The Rise and Fall of SERVE

In early July, 2003, the Pentagon, for which Mr. Flood speaks, contracted with accenture, for which Mr. Soh speaks, to build the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE), an Internet voting system intended to make it easier for military personnel (and some others) to vote while overseas. The widely-reported price tag for SERVE was $22 million, all of which, presumably, would be paid by DoD to accenture, which would be responsible for paying all its subcontractors.

On January 20, 2004, four computer scientists hired by the Pentagon's FVAP unit, which was supervising the creation of the SERVE system, issued a scathing report saying that SERVE was not secure and, most likely, could never be made secure, as long as insecure Windows PCs and the fundamentally insecure Internet were being used to support it. The report recommended shutting SERVE down immediately.

This report and its recommendation was widely reported, for example, in the New York Times.

On January 30th or 31st, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote a memo ordering a "stand-down" of the SERVE system, withdrawing it for use in the November, 2004, elections, while continuing testing and evaluation of the product.

On February 5, 2004, Mr. Wolfowitz' decision was widely reported, as here on the MSNBC web site.

Questions for the Pentagon

On February 9, 2004, this reporter e-mailed a list of ten questions about the shut-down of SERVE to the public affairs office at the Pentagon. Three days later, on February 12, 2004, the Defense Department e-mailed this reporter its replies to these questions.

The most surprising answers from the Pentagon related to the fact that, according to DoD, all $22 million dollars appropriated by Congress to finance SERVE had already been spent as of the end of January. This was noteworthy because, as of January, there had been no announcements that the SERVE Internet voting system had been completely built or tested or evaluated or certified, which certification is another problem all its own. To access 17 previous Latest VotingNews reports about SERVE's (lack of) certification and, in fact, its uncertifiability under existing law, click here.

So on February 18, 2003, this reporter sent another inquiry to the Pentagon, asking, in essence, "How were you planning on completing, deploying, and using SERVE in November, 2004, if you ran out of money by January?" and "How are you going to carry out the residual functions of further testing and evaluation and even certification, if you're out of money?"

It's possible that there's a simple and innocuous answer to these questions. Perhaps the Pentagon planned on asking Congress for a supplemental appropriation to continue and complete its mission. Or that there were, or are, other sources of funding that haven't been revealed. Maybe accenture was going to carry on without being externally funded, in view of the commercial benefit it might have expected to derive from successfully carrying out a large-scale remote Internet voting system.

Until the Pentagon and/or accenture publicly answer these questions, these possibilities will remain merely speculation.

Why was SERVE even started?

That second e-mail inquiry didn't address the exchange in the first set of questions and answers as to why DoD went ahead with SERVE at all when it had been widely known, and publicly documented, that, according to most reputable computer scientists, it was impossible to build a secure remote Internet voting system like SERVE, because of the fundamentally-insecure nature of the Internet. In that exchange, the Pentagon spokesperson simply dodged the question.

For more on how the arguments that put an end to SERVE in January, 2004, had been widely publicized four years and two days earlier, in 2000, click here.

Unanswered Questions

This second set of questions, unlike the first, was not promptly answered. On February 20, 2004, this reporter sent a follow-up e-mail to Glenn Flood at the Pentagon with the same second set of questions and asked for answers to them. As of the writing of this article, on March 5, 2004, there has been none.

On March 4, 2004, this reporter called Mr. Flood at the Pentagon and asked politely when a response to his questions might be forthcoming. "I don't have anything for you," said Mr. Flood. The reporter asked, "Can you tell me if people are looking into this?" "I don’t have anything for you," repeated Mr. Flood.

On the same day, the reporter got a call-back from Peter Y. Soh, already identified above as the Director of Media Relations for the U.S. Government practice of accenture. He staunchly defended accenture's work on the SERVE project, stressing that accenture had, referring to their client, the Federal Voting Assistance Project (FVAP), "met their requirements."

The reporter's efforts to elicit a response from Mr. Soh as to how the program might have continued during the nine more months before and then during the November, 2004, election for which it was intended after it had depleted its funds, or how it could continue to carry out its current, more limited, range of activities without funding, went unanswered. In an eerie echo of Mr. Flood's rejoinder, Mr. Soh told the reporter that, on the subject of any questions about the SERVE budget, "Unfortunately, I can't comment."