Right to vote vs. right to secrecy (Missouri's military email/fax voting)

[Khephra]

WASHINGTON — Missouri's recently announced plan to allow combat-zone soldiers to vote by e-mail has triggered concerns among voting experts over the secrecy and security of those ballots.

They said the system, which would use both e-mail and fax machines to get ballots from military service people in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan back to local election offices in Missouri, could be subject to hacking, viruses and other chicanery because they would not be encrypted.

“These machines are highly vulnerable,” said Barbara Simons, a member of the nonpartisan National Committee for Voting Integrity and a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery. “We could have a virus that changes ballots and then erases itself. It's certainly feasible technically.”

In addition, voting-rights advocates and other political experts said because the system required that ballots be identified by the voters' names for validation purposes, and because they were handled by others several steps along the way, that people serving in the military would lose the right to a secret ballot.

http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/politics/9600636.htm