Security concerns prompt D.C. to suspend Web-based overseas voting

Security issues have prompted election officials in the District of Columbia to suspend a service that aimed to allow overseas voters to cast their ballots via the Web in the November elections.

The vulnerabilities in Washington's new Digital Vote by Mail system were discovered during public testing last week by several security researchers.

Details of the flaws were not immediately available. However, one of them, discovered by a researcher at the University of Michigan, was so serious that it allowed the researcher to take complete control of the system hosting the Web application and tweak it so users who voted would hear a rendition of "Hail to the Victors," a University of Michigan fight song, said one observer of the tests.