Why We Fear the Digital Ballot
201342
While most experts appear to agree that electronic voting has real problems, few argue that they could completely undermine the November election.
303866
The GAO report released earlier this month makes no bones about it: Security and reliability concerns about electronic voting are real and demand attention from federal, state and local authorities. So where, asks Brad Friedman, is the outrage?
295603
Just five weeks before election day, federal legislators are increasingly casting doubt on electronic voting terminals and demanding that touchscreen computers produce paper records.
52967
The more you know about the operations of today's widely trusted commercial computer networks, the more concerned you become about most electronic-voting systems.
685970
(InfoWorld) - Requiring print-outs as a back-up to electronic voting machines would not improve security but would increase costs of U.S. voting systems, according to a report released Tuesday. Tech-focused think tank the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) said so-called voter-verified paper trail ballots used in conjunction with e-voting machines would "prevent the use of innovative voting technology that offers voters more security, transparency, and reliability" than paper-only balloting systems. The U.S. House of Representatives has before it a bill that would require paper-trail ballots to be used with direct recording electronic voting machines. But a paper trail would create several problems, said report author Daniel Castro, an ITIF senior analyst. Paper audit trails would create an "even bigger dispute" than past elections with missing electronic votes, Castro said. "People wouldn't know which record was accurate -- the paper or the electronic record," he said. Paper-trail ballots would also increase the cost of elections, Castro said. Printers will fail on election days, and counting machines will malfunction, he said. "When you manually count it, you have problems with the human element," he added. U.S. residents trust computers to run many other "critical applications" in banking, medicine, and aviation, the report said. Supporters of paper-trail audits disputed the report's findings. "The argument that people trust computers in other places is specious -- safety-critical systems have been developed in other contexts using rigorous standards that are not applied to voting machines," said Eugene Spafford, chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM's) U.S. policy committee. ACM has not called for e-voting machines to be scrapped, but instead for the machines to go through two levels of audit, paper trails and random machine audits, said Spafford, executive director of the Purdue University Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. While the report discounts claims that e-voting machines can be hacked and elections reversed, malicious hacking isn't the only problem with e-voting machines, Spafford added. "Errors, bugs and accidents can also result in problems unless there is an independent, durable audit trail," he said. "Under several guises [the authors] trot out the canard that 'if fraud is so possible, how come it hasn't been proven yet?' This is so obviously wrong that I'm not sure it even deserves a response." Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, suggested readers of the report "consider the source." "This is an industry body that has come out with this screed to support the industry," Smith said. Smith disputed the report's suggestion that a "growing technophobic movement believes that no computer can be trusted for electronic voting." Several prominent computer security experts have called for paper-trail audits, she said. "The harshest critics of e-voting -- in particular paperless e-voting -- are computer technologists who are the literal opposite of technophobic," she said. "What they claim is that in order to have secure elections, they must be auditable and recountable." Instead of printouts, lawmakers should look to the next generation of e-voting machines, the report said. One such technology provides a small receipt that voters can take with them and use to check online whether their ballots have been counted. The receipt would give voters more assurance than a typical paper-trail ballot, which they cannot take with them, Castro said. But Spafford said most newer technologies are unproven, and many aren't transparent to typical voters. "It is important that the mechanism is understandable and trusted by the population as well as correct and auditable by experts," he said. "Systems based on ... cryptographic methods are not understandable to the lay person -- and especially not to technophobic ones. Paper is well understood."
522605
Liberal online activists are finding you can't move elections with  just modems and IM
239264
There is a danger that if the coming election becomes David Geffenâs full-time hobby, his precision ruthlessness will distort the public process.
215062
For some, voting day will be violent and disappointing. For others, just plain confusing. And the Sunnis may have to be drawn in after the fact
577368
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.
589729
A judge said it would be too costly to allow voters skeptical of electronic voting systems to opt for paper ballots.
570807
The 100,000 electronic voting machines in use in Tuesday's election have a big downside: Candidates who dispute the results won't have a way to conduct a meaningful recount. Analysis by Kim Zetter.
55043
Learns that technology is no panacea Florida, the epicentre of hopelessly confused US elections, is chucking touch-screen ballot machines in favour of optical scanners, the Associated Press reports.â¦
89793
By The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Mar. 3--For thousands of you, a ballot is about to come in the mail that may end up saving your home from a disastrous flood. Yes, it is election time once again, but just for some property owners and a single, very special cause.
589747
More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.
393432
Delaying the January vote would raise new dangers. So will going ahead
287811
Ever wonder why fear-mongering seems to work so well at the pollsâwhile appeals to reason often leave the electorate cold? A new book applies neuroscience to politics to figure out why the Democrats struggle to push the buttons in voters' brains.
433895
Voters living abroad face an unwieldy system of absentee balloting that could prevent their votes from being counted.