Sherry Chandler » Unsafe at any speed…
Unsafe at any speed…
A correspondent has drawn my attention to this article in the Washington Post today:
Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.
In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.
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1 Comment
1. MW replies at 1st December 2006, 6:51 pm :
Even if it could be proven to be secure, I’d still feel much more comfortable with a paper backup. Even secure machines can go wrong sometimes, and it just seems like the sensible thing to do, to me.
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