Electronic databases of voter records are, it could be argued, an invitation to election fraud: Even more so than paper documents, insecure digital files could be vulnerable to editing or removal by political operatives.
But as state election officials rush to meet a federal deadline for digitizing their voter records, they might not be doing enough to keep the computerized data private, according to a panel of computer scientists. In a new report commissioned by the Association for Computing Machinery, voting and computing experts offer state officials an exhaustive set of guidelines for creating protected digital databases.
For more on the security concerns surrounding electronic voting, see articles from The Chronicle by Peter Schmidt and Andrea L. Foster.
