E-voting gets the chop at the Pentagon

The internet is a dangerous place, says the Pentagon. And it should it know - it's decided that the web is too risky to even experiment with.

The US security folk had tinkered with the idea of voting over the internet for service personnel and overseas American citizens and spent $22m to see if marrying technology and democracy was feasible. Only now the Pentagon has decided to turn the temporary binning of e-voting into a permanent one - and to bin any trials of internet ballots into the bargain.

The programme has undergone death by a thousand cuts. In February, it was tested in more than 50 countries around the globe but fears over security meant that the votes cast over the internet were considered too insecure to be counted and, unlike paper votes, there is no possibility of a trustworthy recount.

A group of security types charged with testing the programme also declared the idea more full of holes than a block of Swiss cheese and said that the scheme shouldn't go ahead until either the PC or the internet was overhauled wholesale, leading the US defence undersecretary, Paul Wolfowitz, to announce that all forays into e-voting would be shelved for the foreseeable future.

Announcing the halt to the programme in late January, Wolfowitz said that he would reconsider his decision if it could be proved that the system could be made more secure. The security fears haven't yet been overcome and the plans have been shelved indefinitely.

It's not the first time that the US has been burned by e-voting. Recently, the White House spent more than $3bn upgrading some polling stations with e-voting terminals. The rollout didn't go as planned, with turnout in some voting districts topping the 100 per cent mark.

Experiments by the Irish government with internet voting also came under attack from groups concerned about electoral fraud earlier this month - with the system now under review by independent experts, who are due to deliver a final verdict in early May.