US internet voting begins

13:56 27th October 2008

The first internet votes in US presidential history were cast on Friday (October 24th), in an experiment to judge the effectiveness of the process.

The Okaloosa Distance Balloting Pilot, which requires users to print out a paper version of the ballot so that final results can be checked, saw around 600 soldiers in England, Germany and Japan cast their votes online.

This system posed a number of unique problems for officials as laptops had to have their hard drives removed to lessen the chance of a virus infection and the voting software is loaded directly from a CD.

However, David Gill, professor of computer science at Stanford University, believes that the pitfalls of the system outnumber the benefits.

He told Popular Mechanics: "We should not go ahead until full details of the system have been disclosed. The way I look at it, the entire Internet voting part of this scheme is confusing and possibly harmful."

Earlier this month, a survey by the IT operations firm Avocent revealed the UK government is failing to encourage citizens to use their websites.