Nevada officials back e-vote systems for primary, general election
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Nevada election officials are confident that an electronic voting system being used in the Sept. 7 primary and the November election will work as expected, despite a problem that occurred during a demonstration of the technology in California.
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In an effort to increase the integrity of next week&#39;s presidential election, five voting machine makers agreed for the first time to submit their software programs to the National Software Reference Library for safekeeping, federal officials said on
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Are we missing something? Comment Last week, the Department of Constitutional Affairs (DCA) made public the list of local authorities that will be piloting both supervised and remote electronic voting schemes in the May 2007 local elections, despite concerns over unproven technologies and the lack of an audit trail.â¦
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Almost three-quarters of likely voters think electronic voting systems should produce a paper record the voter can verify, according to a new poll. But that's not likely to happen for many of them in November. By Laila Weir.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recommended that the U.S. government require touch-screen electronic voting machines to include independent audit technology, such as printouts. "The lack of an independent audit capability in systems is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections," says a NIST paper released this month. "In practical terms the software-dependent approach cannot be made secure or highly reliable." The Technical Guidelines Development Committee of the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) is scheduled to review the NIST's recommendation that direct record electronic (DRE) machines include voter-verified paper trails or other auditing mechanisms at a meeting Monday and Tuesday. DREs do not assure that voting records are accurate, and 15 states using the e-voting machines do not use independent audit mechanisms statewide, the NIST paper says. "Trust in an election outcome relies heavily upon trusting the correctness of the DRE's software and upon trusting that the DRE software has not been replaced or tampered with," the paper says. "Simply put, the DRE architecture's inability to provide for independent audits of its electronic records makes it a poor choice for an environment in which detecting errors and fraud is important." A spokesman for the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), representing e-voting machine vendors, didn't immediately return a message seeking comment on the NIST recommendations. The ITAA has argued that paper trail ballots may simply print out the same results stored on the DREs. Paper trail systems can be costly to add on to DREs, and printer breakdowns can cause problems during elections, the ITAA has said. One e-voting critic praised the report. "That's really good news," said Barbara Burt, director of the election reform program at Common Cause, one of several groups calling for e-voting paper trails. "It looks like it's going to help us finally get rid of the paperless DREs." NIST's recommendations come after scattered reports of problems with DREs in the Nov. 7 U.S. elections. In Florida's 13th congressional district, Democratic candidate Christine Jennings has filed a lawsuit asking for a revote after 18,000 voters failed to cast a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives race. Two recounts found Republican Vern Buchanan the winner of the race, but Sarasota County did not require the Elections System and Software (ES&S) e-voting machines to include paper printouts to back up the electronic vote. While e-voting supporters say the machines make it hard to undervote, Sarasota County voters cast about 16,000 more votes in the Florida governor's race and in the Florida Senate race than were recorded in the House race. About 4,000 more people cast ballots for the county's Southern District Hospital Board than were recorded in the House race. Thirty-five states either mandate voter-verified paper-trail systems or use them statewide without a mandate, according to the NIST report. But 10 states use paper-trail ballots on a county-by-county basis, and five states, including Maryland, Georgia and Louisiana, use DREs statewide without paper- trail ballots. The NIST paper published this month recommends states use "software-independent" voting systems, using either paper-trail ballots or cryptographic audit systems instead of relying on the "correctness of the software" for election results. The paper suggests that the EAC require audit mechanisms in e-voting machines, and recommends that federal election officials stop certifying e-voting machines without independent audit systems after 2009 or 2010.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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Florida elections supervisors want to give voters several days to elect candidates, a proposal offered after early voting in last month's presidential election apparently helped avoid a repeat of the 2000 election debacle.
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The touch-screen voting machines used in 15 Florida counties appear to work smoothly during the state's primary election Tuesday.
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Activists and computer programmers Wednesday demonstrated what they said were flaws with electronic voting machines that could allow hackers to change vote outcomes Nov. 2. They recommended new procedures for states and counties to put in place before Election Day.
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Friday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports on a controversial decision by Missouri's Secretary of State: the state of Missouri will be allowing soldiers stationed overseas to cast ballots via e-mail. Their absentee ballots will be scanned and converted to PDF files, which will be emailed to the Defense Department, printed out, and then faxed to Missouri.  I'm in favor of helping soldiers vote; this is a democracy, everyone should be able to vote. Yet I'm deeply skeptical of this proposal, for two reasons:  The plan depends on e-mailed ballots being printed out and faxed by the Defense Department but does not provide any safeguards against soldiers being sanctioned for how they have voted;  The transmission method is inherently technically insecure
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A proposal that would let voters decide whether to allow slot machines at race tracks and jai alai frontons in South Florida won approval after elections officials discovered thousands of absentee votes missed in an electronic tally on Election Day.
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Opponents of controversial law win vote in the Senate on Wednesday to restrict uses of the forthcoming digital ID cards, signaling the political winds may have shifted.
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Six U.S. states participating in Super Tuesday primary elections are at high risk for voting-machine malfunction or tampering because they don&#39;t have paper backups, according to a report released by the Verified Voting Foundation and Common Cause.Ed Felten, a computer science professor at Princeton University, added visuals to the report&#39;s findings when he published a picture on his blog showing him standing next to unattended e-voting machines in New Jersey Sunday evening. The picture, and a second photo from Monday evening of unattended e-voting machines, was a repeat performance for Felten, who also published a picture of unattended machines during the 2006 election.&quot;It&#39;s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election,&quot; Felten, an e-voting critic, wrote on his blog Tuesday. &quot;Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that this isn&#39;t a problem because the machines are well guarded so that no would-be attacker can get to them. Which would be mildly reassuring -- if it were true.&quot;New Jersey was one of the states most at risk with the others being New York, Tennessee, Georgia, Delaware, and Arkansas, said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report. All of those states, except New York, use electronic voting machines without paper ballots in all or part of the state. New York has passed a paper record law but has not yet replaced lever machines used across most of the state, the groups said. Lever machines can malfunction and are subject to tampering, the groups said.But e-voting advocates said the Common Cause/Verified Voting Foundation report exaggerates potential problems with electronic voting machines.&quot;In the history of the United States, there has never been a case of tampering with electronic voting equipment in an actual live election environment with all of the associated procedures and election personnel, either with voter verifiable paper trails or without,&quot; said Michelle Shafer, vice president of communications and external affairs at e-voting machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems. &quot;Election administration is about the people, procedures and the technology, not just the technology itself.&quot;In many cases, states maintain individual electronic files of all votes cast, added David Beirne, executive director of trade group, the Election Technology Council. Many states also require logic and accuracy testing both before and after an election, and many e-voting machines have redundant memory mechanisms, he added.&quot;No voting system represents a high risk for the states that are using them,&quot; he said. &quot;The main objection from Verified Voting ... is that the voter is not verifying a paper document in addition to the electronic record. The voter does verify the electronic record, and the election can be verified for its integrity through the use of the appropriate security procedures by local election officials.&quot;The report &quot;reflects a series of perceptions which are not grounded in fact,&quot; Beirne added.But the high-risk states have no choice but to trust the information that the electronic machines spit out, said Pamela Smith, president of the Verified Voting Foundation. &quot;The vote is what it is, or what the machine says it is,&quot; she said. &quot;There&#39;s no way to do a recount.&quot;In addition, another five states -- Alabama, Arizona, Massachusetts, Utah, and Oklahoma -- use paper ballots along with their e-voting machines, but don&#39;t require regular audits to check the electronic results, the groups said. Four states with primaries on Tuesday use voting machines but also require regular audits, and were listed as low-risk in the report. Those states were California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Missouri.Twenty-four states hold presidential primaries or caucuses on Tuesday, but just 15 of them use electronic voting machines.
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Alarmed by software glitches, security threats and computer crashes with ATM-like voting machines, officials from Washington, D.C., to California are considering an alternative from an unlikely place: Nevada.
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Nevada voters make their choices for  Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on Saturday  in a process as quirky as Las Vegas itself and almost as  unpredictable as a casino game.
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A bill that could come up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives this week would require that all e-voting machines used in the November 2008 U.S. elections be accompanied by a voter-verified paper ballot.
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A federal advisory group rejected a measure yesterday that would have discouraged states from using electronic voting systems that lack an independent means of verifying their results, according to a spokeswoman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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Amid plenty of shouting and confusion, Nevada voters expressed a preference on Saturday for Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Hillary Clinton in an U.S. election process as quirky as Las Vegas itself.