Online voting gets a vote of no confidence

Voting glitches marred the 2000 presidential election, but an online alternative is not viable, according to the principal researcher for AT&T Labs, a multinational research organization.Computers can have a place in the election process, Avi Rubin said at the RSA Conference 2002, hosted in San Jose, Calif., last month by RSA Security Inc. of Bedford, Mass. But Rubin warned against going completely digital.“I don’t want a computer to be counting things as the only record we have,” he said, because computer and network vulnerabilities are too widespread and the risk of manipulation too great.Rubin took part in a National Science Foundation workshop on electronic voting in October 2000. The workshop concluded that the dominant Microsoft Windows-Intel platform was inadequate for voting machines and the Internet was unsatisfactory for a polling infrastructure.