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The system, called the Secure Electronic Registration and Voter Experiment, or SERVE, is designed to allow U.S. military personnel and civilians living overseas to log onto a computer terminal and cast an absentee ballot.
The backers of the SERVE system downplayed the findings Wednesday, saying other experts disagree.
According to the report, the online nature of SERVE could easily allow a hacker to tamper with the voting results.
"Because the danger of successful large-scale attacks is so great, we reluctantly recommend shutting down the development of SERVE and not attempting anything like it in the future until both the Internet and the world's home computer infrastructure have been fundamentally redesigned, or some other unforeseen security breakthroughs appear," the report said.
"This is a minority report from one of the peer-review groups we invited to look at the SERVE system," said department spokesman Glen Flood. "Out of this group of about 10 or 11 members, only four of them decided that concerns were warranted.
"We respect what they've done," Flood said of the dissenting members. "They have excellent credentials, but we stand by the SERVE program."
Flood did not appear to be amused by this reporter's questions. "Go ahead, make fun of us," he said. "We've heard it all. Internet voting machines elect porn stars, cast one vote and you'll be getting spam for the rest of your life, BLASTER32 is the next President, yadda yadda yaddda. Well, get over it. This is a serious task, and we have taken it seriously."
Nonetheless, experts agree that the use of the internet to transmit ballots and votes exposes the system to unique threats. "We found that several candidates were trying to boost their ballot rankings by abuse of keywords," said one beta-tester. "We heard that Al Sharpton had changed his name to Al XXX SEX SEX SEX PORN WOMEN XXX Sharpton by adding an extra 'SEX' to his name."
Other experts suggest that a little-noticed aspect of the program may in fact provide a high degree of security. "It's a government program," said Exuma Slideshow, of the tech magazine "Version 4.38.1c (beta)." The specs were originally written during the Carter Administration, so it's written entirely in FORTRAN, and can only run on a DEC VAX 11/780. Thankfully, the government has a lot of them, but nobody else does, so it'll be hard to recreate."
Nonetheless, fifteen minutes of searching on the internet by this reporter turned up a fully-implemented VAX 11/780 emulator running on a Casio wristwatch. We bought it and gave it to the 12-year old who lives next door, who used it to hack the SERVE system and elect Britney Spears President, a task that took all of eight minutes.
Told of this result, Mr. Flood said "President Spears has complete confidence in the system."
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