Andrew W. Appel (Princeton, Computer Science) and Philip B. Stark (UC Berkeley, Statistics) have a new paper cautioning about a new software designed to accelerate the count for overseas votes by relying on the internet.

. . . . The enunciated motivation for the [“MERGE”] protocol is to allow (electronic) votes from overseas military voters to be included in preliminary results before a (paper) ballot is received from the voter. MERGE contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound; but to make the system trustworthy–to apply the MERGE protocol–would require major changes to the laws, practices, and technical and logistical abilities of U.S. election jurisdictions. The gap between theory and practice is large and unbridgeable for the foreseeable future. . . .