As the annual beauty pageant called student elections bears down upon us, Cal State Long Beach will be asked to trust a new venue when the polls open – electronic voting.
Those who habitually open e-mails from campus organizations known to create taxes called “student fees,” are aware of the blanket Associated Students Inc. message informing CSULB students to responsibly enjoy e-voting between April 21-24, or else we might lose our thumbs.
The foreboding mental terror of some crooked-nosed, cauliflower-eared guy named “Fat Tony” muscling after us if we accidentally hit “Enter” more than once while checking our favorite candidate’s box could be a psychological deterrent to participating.
The e-mail deals a mixed message of optimism and menace by less-than-subliminally warning us to take caution if we decide to risk involvement in the event from the confines of our cyber booth.
It states that any tampering or double voting can result in academic discipline, including suspension, expulsion or worse. Not very inviting, is it?
It’s clear that ASI is trying something new in order to increase student involvement in the campus election processes. Following last year’s less-than-stellar turnout (the current ASI president won a runoff election by less than 20 votes out of the meager 1,027 votes cast), it’s obvious more student voting is crucial for getting positive representation in areas that affect our university experience.
The e-voting concept also has great potential to have a positive environmental impact by saving some trees from sacrificing their lives so we can have somebody decide whether or not we need a few more campus Starbucks.
No matter how much we might love each candidate, or how indebted we are to them for nixing a past tanning salon scheme, will we toss caution to the wind and participate electronically?
More importantly, is the system prone to external tampering?
Not really, it seems, at least according to the people running the show. The company providing the electronic elections, BigPulse, flaunts flowery testimonials from universities like Brandeis, CSU Bakersfield and California Baptist.
The company’s website boasts, “BigPulse operates at the leading edge of democracy,” and makes the visitor feel warm and fuzzy that all personal information is absolutely secure.
But e-voting is still a new process and the opportunity for identity thieves to hack into private information far surpasses the ability of a company or student governing body to make absolute security guarantees.
Another poll provider, Sequoia Voting Systems, was recently hacked into, according to InfoWorld.com. A study showed that testers were able to fairly easily overwrite some of the company’s firmware. They discovered the testers also could “replace it with malicious programs – which, at times, could alter the recording, reporting and tallying of votes.”
Ignoring the possibility that some unscrupulous party could rig the elections with some form of chicanery, we still must worry about the possible theft of important personal information.
The FBI recently estimated that more than nine million people are victimized by identity theft each year. They estimate that some form of identity theft happens every three to five seconds.
In February, J. Alex Halderman, a computer science graduate student at Princeton, was the keynote speaker at a hacker convention. After studying California’s electronic voting system, Halderman found that he could “with very little work, expose who voted for whom, violating voter secrecy.”
Imagine what a hacker can do with a little more work. This is a little more important than choosing the blue ribbon pig at the country fair.
As lawn signs are popping up around the campus like springtime daisies begging us to “Vote for Goofy,” “Choose Obamillary for change,” or “Pick my Booger,” we need to ponder whether our private information is secure or accessible in the public domain – even if it means allowing the wanton murder of another Douglas Fir?
Popularity contests, student elections and pony races are fun and necessary, but we need to consider other things than whether or not we get booted out of school for voting while intoxicated or some other form of “electile” dysfunction.
We need to be concerned with the ASI and BigPulse’s ability to guard our social security numbers and electronic financial DNA.
