Cast your votes for President at KatherineHarris.com!

Here's a story from the Wall Street Journal that we are surprised is not getting more attention. The Pentagon is seeking to improve voting procedures for overseas military personnel in Federal elections. All this in the context of a the Florida count from 2000 which was decided by either a few hundred votes, or just three (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas). And we even recall some specific yelling and screaming about the overseas votes from the military in that election, something about how Al Gore was personally making sure that none of them would ever be counted. So one would think that proper handling of these overseas votes is a sensitive issue. Well, here are the essential aspects of the WSJ story (subs. req'd).

1. The contract for handling the votes went to Accenture. Which used to be known as Andersen Consulting. Which used to be the sister firm of Arthur Andersen, the noted accounting and auditing firm. But leave aside the rotting carcass of its former sister firm; Accenture is also one of those firms that moved its HQ to Bermuda to lower its US taxes. There were attempts in Congress to deny Federal contracts to firms pulling this trick, but the attempts were blocked, pretty much along straight partisan lines. If the referee in the coming Superbowl took the field in a New England Patriots uniform, would we have much expectation of a fair contest? Well, Accenture has taken the field and they're not wearing black and white.

2. Accenture's brilliant idea for improving voting is to use...the Internet. Yes, the Paris Hilton videos, the phishing scams, the Nigerian bank accounts, even the blogs, will now be sharing bandwidth with soldiers casting their votes next November. The idea of electronic voting is already controversial, because of the scope for high-tech meddling and the associated lack of traceability and verifiability of votes -- and these criticisms arise in the context of dedicated voting machines not hooked up to the information superhighway.

[Of Irish interest: this controversy is very active in the Republic because of the country's aggressive move to electronic voting; see the blog GUBU for a recent tirade and while you're at it, check out the blogatrix's discovery about who exactly in high authority has been reading her blog; look for the posts about Moriarty]

So now take all the concerns about electronic voting, blend with all the concerns about Internet security, and you have a fiasco -- at least in the opinion of the experts, but not of course the Pentagon or the fine Bermudans at Accenture:

The experts' report on Serve* said hackers could attack the system, resulting in "large-scale, selective voter disenfranchisement, or privacy violation, or vote buying and selling ... ." Also, Serve is vulnerable to vote switching, even to the extent that it could affect the outcome of an election, the report said.

What's more, the vulnerabilities can't be fixed by changes to Serve, the report asserted. Instead, the vulnerabilities are linked to the design of the Internet as well as computer hardware and software, the authors said.

Accenture said Serve is secure and reliable
[*the Acronym: Secure Electronic Registration & Voting Experiment]

Note: they don't say for what purpose it is secure and reliable.

UPDATE: some signs late on Wednesday that the story is being picked up; here's the New York Times story. But so far it's only that commie rag, the Wall Street Journal, noting Accenture's Bermuda domicile.