The First Federally Certified Voting System

InternetVoting writes "The Election Assistance Commission has announced the first ever federally certified voting system. While the Election Management System (EMS) 4.0 by MicroVote General Corporation has successfully completed 17 months of testing, many questions still remain about the United States' voting system Testing and Certification program. Many systems are still being tested to obsolete standards, the current standards are set to become obsolete soon and cost estimates for future certifications are skyrocketing. The future of improved innovating voting systems does not look bright."

Comments

They slso sold un-certified gear - and got busted

[BiggerIsBetter]

Good for them, but it's worth noting that they've previously been fined for violating election laws by selling uncertified equipment to the State of Indiana.

One huge problem is the labs..."fail" all over 'em

[JimMarch(equalccw)]

Some have even been booted out of the process for poor performance, most recently when NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) started looking at them. Systest was just kicked out, see this story and links from there for details:

http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/79428.html

Cyber was so bad, you could jam a cheap pocket calculator halfway into a banana, pay 'em enough money and they'd have declared it "an acceptable election technology" or somedamnthing.

Re:They slso sold un-certified gear - and got bust

[cbiltcliffe]

Good to know.

And realistically, wouldn't a paper ballot and a pencil be the first federally certified voting system?

Or was that method so simple that no certification was deemed necessary?

I'm not an American, so I'm making some assumptions here, and I'd really be interested in knowing this.

If paper and pencil are certified, why the need for a second system?

If paper and pencil are not certified, why the need for a system that's so complex that it needs certification in the first place?

(Probably preaching to the converted with that last question, but still.....)

Show me...

[Anonymous Coward]

... the source code?

The problem is the system

[Geoffrey.landis]

But the real problem with voting is the One Vote, Plurality wins counting system, which drives out third parties and means that in a multi-contestant election, the winner almost never gets a majority. This is known to be a bad system. It may indeed be true that all voting systems may have problems, but one vote, plurality wins has very bad problems.

There are much better counting systems-- approval voting is simple and easy, for example, and much much better. Range voting also has a lot to say for it-- mathematically it's similar to approval, but hey, if you can rate your local restaurant on a scale of 1 to 5, you can learn to rate politicians the same way.