Electronic Voting Machines Need More Safeguards

Looks like e-voting is starting to catch the interest of technologists such as Dan Gillmor, in the Silicon Valley.

http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/001205.shtml#001205

Sometime in the next few weeks, California will decide whether voters will have any reason to trust the outcomes of elections in the 21st century.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley will issue directions to local officials who are buying touch-screen voting machines and other devices known as "Direct Recording Electronic" (DRE) equipment. If he honors the position he holds, he'll order voting officials to take many more steps to ensure voter trust in these systems than they've been willing to take so far.

Specifically, he should tell them that they must, as part of the verification process, create what's called a "paper trail" -- a printout that the voter can look at to verify that the ballot was recorded according to his or her wishes, a document that could later be used for recounts and audits to ensure that the machines had worked as designed.

That anyone disputes this need is astonishing. Yet some people who normally take the side of underdogs, who are passionate about voting rights and the accuracy of elections, are making a common mistake.

They're putting unwarranted trust in technology. They're believing that private companies, for the first time in recorded history, can produce perfect, tamper-proof electronic devices.

by the Senate Ethics Committee. Perhaps this is as a result of him speaking out last week against the BFEE et al.

http://www.hillnews.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx

and people HATE to admit they made a mistake. In the interest of national secuirty why would anyone trust ant private company without drastic security clearance and oversight to both craft and oversee hardware software and process. Yet the company has a cloud of partisanship and dubious methodolgy coupled to permissiveness, dumb enthusasiasm and a dangerous salemanship policy to make one company domiante most others where their partisan leanings most hold sway.

Why are so many national organizations, advocacy pros and hithertoo wary fighters being taken to the cleaners on simple tech issues? Too proud to seek expertise outside their prestigious experience and college dgrees? Too much schmoozing with really untrustworthy salesmen?

Anyone can be stupid and duped. "Smart" people can be harder cases than anyone because of pride and not wanting to believe they have failed so miserably as to defeat everything they stood for. Stupidity is merely misapplied intelligence due mainly to bad emotional skills.

I am really worried that unless a credible shocking lawsuit is quickly brought against one of these companies, what we know has happened will happen again right in plain sight as it did in Florida. The first victims will be in the Dem primaries. What happened to Reno was just a warmup and they got away with everything completely.