Recently reading about the Online Voter Registration process where in which a voter could easily register for the Presdential elections held this year. The process is that the voter could easily register with any photo Id card such as driver’s license or a copy of a current utility bill, bank statement, paycheck or other government document showing name and address.
The researchers from the University of Michigan, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a former president of the Association for Computing Machinery informed government officials from Maryland and Washington D.C that these system is security vulnerable. As in case of Maryland driver’s license that is used for registration are derived from the person’s full name and birth-date which is right now difficult to hard to find, so a hacker could possibly make changes in the registration information and it may happen that person might end up not voting.
The solution offered to this problem computer scientists were to use the non public information like the 4 digits of SSN for the registration. But according to me even that information is also not private any more as that is spread in different places like when you create rent or buy the property you share the SSN info along with that the SSN is also widely available in the taxpayer forms.
Recent hacked in the South Carolina Revenue dept had resulted in about 3.6 million SSN stolen/leaked along with that many other information about the tax payer, this event had happened during Aug-27 to Oct-10. Though the officials haven’t yet understood the usage of those information. This breach confirms that the solution offered as using SSN for voter registration may not be the optimal solution. This breach also gives some reasons that this hack may happened to give some advantage in election.
So still the possible solution for voter registration remained open….
References:
2)http://www.thestate.com/2012/10/26/2496396/south-carolina-taxpayers-privacy.html#.ULB_ZZv1T0E