Military e-mail vote risky, experts warn

WASHINGTON — Time was when soldiers, if they wanted to vote, had to request ballots by snail mail, fill them out and return them the same way.

The process typically took weeks.

This year, thousands of soldiers around the world have the opportunity to vote in Tuesday's elections by e-mail. It's part of a Pentagon effort to make it easier for overseas military personnel to cast ballots in federal and state elections, and it reflects how the Internet has changed life in the combat zone.

But computer-security experts inside and outside the government warned that the Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program ignores the risks associated with unencrypted e-mail: interception, hacking and identity theft.

"E-mail traffic can flow through equipment owned and operated by various governments, companies and individuals in many countries," Joel Rothschild, a Navy Reserve captain, said in an August report prepared for the Pentagon. "It is easily monitored, blocked and subject to tampering."

A separate report by four outside computer-security experts released last week raised similar red flags and added that the use of unencrypted e-mail for registering overseas voters invited identity theft.

"No bank would ask their customers to send Social Security numbers over unencrypted e-mail," said the report's co-author, David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. But that is what the system allows, he said.

Rothschild's report noted that e-mails can be encrypted to reduce tampering risks. Pentagon officials said states would need to arrange that.

States have options for getting ballots to and from voters. They can fax, e-mail or mail the ballots.

The federal government began the use of faxed ballots in 1990.

Neither the Pentagon nor state officials say they track how many of the 294,000 military personnel overseas are voting by e-mail.

Anecdotally, the number of military personnel voting by e-mail appears limited.

In Colorado, Jefferson County elections official Shawna Weir said she has received three ballots that military voters sent by e-mail. The service members e-mailed their ballots to a federal facility in Virginia, which faxed them to the county.