U.S. board approves testing of e-voting machines
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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission approved a testing and certification program for e-voting machines.
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Local elections in 23 counties ran without a hitch on Tuesday in the biggest test yet of the state's new law requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot, election officials said.
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Brownwood Bulletin. &quot;Check 21,&quot; a federal law allowing the nation&#39;s banks to more efficiently process paper checks electronically, went into effect Thursday, but three Brownwood bankers said
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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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A Maryland judge has dismissed a challenge to the state's electronic voting system and ruled that elections officials have made a reasonable effort to ensure that votes will be counted properly in November.
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The testing of the electronic voting machines in FloridaÃ¢ÂÂs disputed 13th Congressional District race is expected to conclude Friday night. State elections officials then will proceed with additional audit activities to determine whether voting machine errors affected the outcome Ã¢ÂÂ certified by state officials as a narrow 369-vote victory for the Republican nominee, car dealership owner Vern Buchanan.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. House of Representatives is set to vote as early as Thursday on a bill that would require a paper record for electronic voting machines. Representative Rush Holt's Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act, which has 216 cosponsors in the 435-member House, would require that all e-voting machines used in the November 2008 U.S. elections be accompanied by a voter-verified paper ballot. E-voting critics have been calling for paper-trail ballots for several years, arguing there's no way to audit e-voting machines without them. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, said on his Web site that he's pleased the House is set to move forward with the legislation. His bill would require random audits of voting results in 3 percent of all U.S. precincts, and it would prohibit e-voting machines that include wireless or Internet connections. While groups like Common Cause and VerifiedVoting.org have called for paper trails, groups like the National Federation of the Blind have resisted efforts to slow the adoption of e-voting machines, saying e-voting allows blind people to vote without assistance for the first time. The Holt bill faces several obstacles to becoming law, said Matt Zimmerman, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which supports the bill. "It is not at all clear whether the bill will pass or, even if it does, whether a substantively similar companion bill will then pass the Senate," Zimmerman wrote on the EFF blog. "Like it or not, with election officials arguing that they're running out of time to implement wholesale changes, this likely amounts to Congress's only attempt to make any serious improvements to the nation's election procedures ahead of the 2008 presidential election." Common Cause sent an alert to members Wednesday morning, urging them to contact lawmakers in support of the bill, said Mary Boyle, a Common Cause spokeswoman. "This is the last chance for Congress to ensure that ballots are backed by paper records in the critical 2008 presidential election," she said.
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With a recount of the Nov. 2 election results almost complete in Ohio, officials said Tuesday their electronic voting systems worked as promised, despite alleged problems with some machines.
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Touch-screen voting machines likely performed properly and were not to blame for the large number of undervotes in a congressional race in 2006, as the loser has suggested, federal investigators said in a draft report obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press.
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A Diebold Election Systems spokesman dismissed criticism of the company's e-voting hardware, saying it is secure and works as it should.
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Authorities call pilot test an important milestone for remote electronic voting.
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A Washington-based public opinion firm has released the results of an election day survey of Nevada voters showing 81% support for the issuance of paper receipts when votes are cast electronically.
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(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."
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(InfoWorld) - A U.S. government board looking for ways to improve the security of electronic voting machines has taken the first step toward requiring the machines to have independent audit mechanisms, a day after it rejected a different audit proposal. The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), an advisory board to the U.S. Elections Assistance Commission (EAC), on Tuesday unanimously passed a resolution calling on its Security and Transparency Subcommittee to draft requirements for independently verifiable voting records, such as voter-verified paper trail printouts, to be used with direct record electronic (DRE) machines. The new proposal, offered by TGDC member Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calls on the subcommittee to write requirements for the next generation of e-voting machines that make them "software independent" -- to include an audit mechanism independent of the software inside the machines. Rivest said he was happy the second proposal passed, even though the first failed. "I think it's very important for the safety of voting machines in this country," he said of the TGDC's vote. The Association for Computing Machinery's Public Policy Committee, critics of e-voting, praised the TGDC's Tuesday vote. "We have long held the position that there needs to be a means of verification that voters recognize as the vote they cast," the group said in a statement. "The committee ... rightly acknowledges that further research in this field is needed to provide innovative solutions to the e-voting challenges remaining." Critics of e-voting machines have called for paper-trail audits as a way for voters to ensure their votes are tallied correctly. In a November report, staff at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology advocated that the U.S. government require e-voting machines to include independent audit mechanisms, saying DREs without audit mechanisms "cannot be made secure or highly reliable." But during the TGDC meeting, H. Stephen Berger, chairman of the voting systems standards committee for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), questioned how other industries could create software that has few errors, such as software on electronic equipment used on airplanes. The software on a typical DRE is less than a megabyte, and e-voting vendors should be able to find a way to make it secure and error-free without adding paper trail audits, he said during debate Tuesday. "I have to believe we can verify and put very careful controls on that, so that we can get an accurate and verified record of what the voter does in the booth," Berger said. But Internet browsers have less code than the typical DRE and still have "tons of problems" with security, said Daniel Schutzer, executive director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. "If money were no object, if time were no object," e-voting machine vendors could create software that was free of bugs and could be tested and verified, Schutzer added. "Considering what we're working with ... that's still a pipe dream." Monday's failed proposal, also offered by Rivest, called on the U.S. government to develop e-voting machine guidelines only for machines that included independent audit capabilities. It would be "unwise" to allow the use of DREs that do not include independent audits, it said. Tuesday's proposal, which passed unanimously, took a slightly less restrictive approach. It called for future DREs to include audit mechanisms, and it said TGDC should "ensure that systems that produce independently verifiable voting records are reliable and provide adequate support for audits." But the proposal that passed stopped short of requiring the current generation of e-voting machines to add on audit mechanisms. "Election officials and vendors have appropriately responded to the growing complexity of voting systems by adding more stringent access controls, encryption, testing, and physical security to election procedures and systems," the proposal said. The new proposal addressed some TGDC concerns about accessibility for disabled people and what to do with existing e-voting machines, Rivest said by phone. "It's not a motion to encourage people to dump their machines in any way," he said. The Election Assistance Commission will hear a report about the TGDC action at a meeting Thursday, but the new audit standards likely wouldn't go into effect until after 2010.
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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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Black Box Voting hopes to halt the use of Diebold's voting machines.
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A federal advisory panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines that produced results that could be independently verified.