Report finds e-vote promise, problems

Oakland Tribune ^ | 10/22/05 | Ian Hoffman

[NormsRevenge]

In a report released Friday, the investigative arm of Congress found that fully electronic voting machines hold promise for U.S. elections but still have security and reliability problems. E-voting failures in elections have been a problem in California, and the state's experiences are mentioned several times in the latest report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Analysts for the GAO found that crucial vote-recording and tallying files could be altered, that voting software often had weak or nonexistent password protections and that manufacturers had installed unapproved software in several places, including California.

Yet fixing those problems could be years away.

The GAO called on e-voting manufacturers to design these instruments of democracy with security in mind and to devise better paper trails so the public and elections officials can verify the accuracy of their machines without sacrificing voter privacy.

All levels of government, the GAO concluded, need stronger rules and testing for electronic-voting systems.

But few of those things are likely to happen until after the 2006 elections and some not until after most states have held the 2008 presidential primary.

In response to outcry over the 2000 elections, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act in 2002, providing money for modernizing voting systems nationwide. The law also created the Election Assistance Commission, and among other things tasked the tiny new agency with approving new standards for voting equipment, labs to test them and ultimately the voting machinery itself.

But Congress never granted a full appropriation to the election commission or to the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which was to provide technical help. As a result, the new standards for security, performance and accuracy of voting systems have been three years in the making and may not be applied to actual voting systems until 2007. New labs to test voting systems to the standards won't be approved until then, and the existing laboratories may continue testing voting systems to older standards until June 2008.

"It's the first report to come out and say this job isn't happening the way it should be," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. "It lays bare the inadequacies of federal oversight of our voting systems."

The GAO's report also marks the strongest federal statements to date favoring the use of multiple ballot records, such as paper trails, to make sure electronic-voting systems work properly and vote tallies are accurate.

"That's really neat. It's sort of a burden on election administrators, but if you really want to cross your T's, it needs to be done," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a Berkeley graduate student researching voting technologies as part of ACCURATE, a federally funded project involving several U.S. universities.

Hall wishes federal analysts had seen the need for more transparency in voting-system testing and purchases. At present, testing labs do not share their methods or findings with state and local elections officials, and vendors insist that much information about their machines and software are trade secrets that cannot be revealed to the public.

Still, Hall said, " It's great to see these things on paper and recommended that we take this more seriously, that we do auditing and incident reporting that a lot of us feel should be part of the process anyway."

[upchuck]

Some interesting, scary thoughts from Bev Harris.

[NormsRevenge]

Thanks for the link!

I've think I have heard her on a radio show talking about the issues and such involved. It is a whole new can of worms being opened.

[supercat]

No system that uses rewritable media to record votes can be trusted if the people running it cannot. And Washington State adequately demonstrates that people running elections cannot be trusted.

[holyscroller]

It's already impossible to get an honest election in Washington State. Computer voting will be the final straw. Until we demand that every voter re-register and thus clean all the dead, duplicate and non-existent voters off the rolls, no system of voting will result in an honest result. The Dems have thousands of non-existent voters on the books.