What to Watch Out After the 14th Congress is Seated

I just hope that the COMELEC will pay attention to these issues when they draft their proposal to the recently passed election automation bill since there are some calls within the COMELEC to use e-voting system…

From silicon.com:

Privacy campaigners have called for any further e-voting trials to be scrapped after uncovering evidence of poor security, inadequate audit trails, equipment failures and an over-dependence on technology suppliers during the May local elections.

The Open Rights Group (ORG) had a team of 25 officially accredited election observers at the e-voting and e-counting pilots and has expressed “deep concern” about the use of the technology in a report of its findings.

Five councils offered internet and telephone voting and six authorities were approved to use electronic counting technology at the May local elections.

Numerous problems were observed with the e-voting technologies by the ORG. In Swindon laptops and live electronic voting registers were unreliable and kept crashing, while in Rushmoor an online ballot paper temporarily included a Labour party logo next to the Conservative party candidate.

The observers also found evidence of weak physical security of the e-voting equipment, such as PCs with open ports and networking devices in openly accessible public areas.

Additional concerns are raised in the report about the alleged vulnerability of the system used to host internet voting for Rushmoor and South Buckinghamshire authorities. According to the report, the system could potentially allow hackers to steal authentication details, monitor how someone had cast their vote or change the contents of the online ballot paper.