The military votes that came in late in Florida 2000 were often undated. There was a hurry-up effort to encourage people to get theirs in. I would bet money some were cast late, and I would bet even more money some were fraudulent and sent in by someone other than the voter after it was determined the election was close.
Meanwhile, don't worry your pretty little heads about military voting. The Pentagon has been worrying for you. No prob, no prob at all. Uh-huh.
Many to cast ballots by Internet in 2004http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-07-12-internet-vote_x.htm#Posted 7/12/2003 3:19 AM
WASHINGTON (AP) - Imagine casting a vote for president from a cybercafe in Thailand, an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf or a laptop computer at home.
Thousands of people serving in the military and Americans living abroad will have that option next year in the nation's most extensive Internet voting experiment, viewed by some as a step toward elections in cyberspace.
The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, which began as a tiny demonstration project in the 2000 general election and involved just 84 voters, could give 100,000 voters the chance to cast absentee ballots online in next year's presidential primaries and general election.
The Pentagon-run program will be limited to eligible voters whose homes in the United States are in South Carolina and Hawaii, as well as residents in a handful of counties in Arkansas, Florida, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington.
"Internet voting takes just seconds instead of weeks if you were to put that ballot in the mail and send it off," said Polli Brunelli, director of the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program. "What we're trying to do is make sure that we have an alternative out there for those people who are unable to vote by mail."
If it proves successful, the $22 million program could be expanded to serve
more than 6 million voters in the armed forces living here and abroad, their dependents and nonmilitary U.S. citizens residing overseas.
Voters using SERVE can register to vote and cast their ballots from any Microsoft Windows-based computer with Internet access. Local election officials will use the system to process voter registration applications, send ballots to voters and accept voted ballots instantly. Long delays in counting absentee ballots, a factor in the disputed 2000 presidential election, would be a thing of the past.
Security remains the top concern for the system's coordinators and fodder for critics.
"I think Internet voting is a good idea for this population if you can assure security, but I'm not confident that they can do that," said John Dunbar, a project manager at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. "It wouldn't take much for some smart hacker to send around a virus that lays in wait for someone to issue a vote."
Other computer security experts call the project an open invitation to election tampering.
"We're opening up a whole host of opportunities for voter coercion and voter fraud," said Rebecca Mercuri, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who specializes in studying electronic vote tabulation.
Mercuri said even the most secure systems can be cracked, hacked or left vulnerable to Internet viruses, leaving the ballot contents and the identity of the voter open to perusal.
"If we have this going on in commerce and all other transactions on the Internet why would people think we can avoid it in voting?" she said. "This is just an experiment that's doomed."
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