Electronic Voting in the News

heymarcel writes "After a negative review of the Diebold voting machines by the State Gaming Control Board, it looks like Nevada has gone with a competitor for the upcoming election. And Secretary of State Dean Heller is requiring paper receipts. According to the Associated Press story, Nevada is the first state to do so." There's another story about Nevada voting machines as well. zapf writes "It appears that the major e-Voting machine vendors have banded together to form the 'Election Technology Council.'" Reader SemperUbi writes: "Demand for a voter-verified audit trail is really gaining momentum these days. The Voter Verification Act, introduced yesterday by Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida), would require a voter-verified paper audit trail, ban the use of 'undisclosed' software and wireless communications for voting machines, and require mandatory surprise recounts -- all in time for the November 2004 election. Rep. Holt's HR2239 in the House requires much the same thing. Resistance to both bills may focus on the aggressive timetable, but the effort is worth it -- as Warren Slocum once said, democracy ain't cheap. Take that, Diebold!" And finally, a Maryland newspaper dredges up an internal Diebold email that recommends gouging Maryland if the state wants paper printouts for its Diebold voting system.

Comments

Re:Won't matter Bush will win 49 states

[Faggot]

...which is another way of saying "Maybe Bush will be democratically-elected this time around."

Re:Why did this happen?

[Zeinfeld]

Maybe because there wasn't any grand conspiracy to begin with...

I seriously doubt that there was a grand conspiracy. The problem with the Diebold scandal was that the company simply did not understand the standard they would be held to or why they would be held to it.

If Diebold was really up to no good their CEO would not have been blabbing about it in GOP fundraising letters. The GOP is arrogant but they are not that stupid. Of course one does wonder about the sense of a CEO who makes that type of statement when a very large proportion of the population believe that the 2000 Presidential election was rigged by the GOP.

Diebold needs to have a change in attitude, to understand the issues from the point of view of the security community. I do not believe that there is anything intrinsically broken here that cannot be fixed. We can add security and audit trails to address these issues, the starting point is we need them to ask.

It is in nobody's interest to have uncertainty here. What Diebold needs to do is assemble a technical review panel of network security specialists with international reputations, listen to and implement the recommendations.

This is a reputation issue, there are technical means Diebold can use to improve their reputation.