A federal advisory panel has ruled against a proposal that would have required electronic voting machines to produce a verifiable paper ballot. A report released last week by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that detailed the vulnerabilities of popular e-voting machines inspired the proposal, but was ultimately discarded.
Just because the Democrats won an election doesn’t mean these machines are suddenly secure. On the contrary, the flaws in equipment made by Diebold and other companies have been well documented.

AP via Common Dreams:

A federal advisory panel on Monday rejected a recommendation that states use only voting machines that produced results that could be independently verified.

The panel drafting voting guidelines for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission voted 6-6 not to adopt a proposal that would have required electronic machines used by millions of voters to produce a paper record or other independent means of checking election results. Eight votes were needed to pass it.

The failed resolution, proposed by Ronald Rivest, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientist and panel member, closely mirrored a report released last week warning that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to errors and fraud and cannot be made secure.

Some panel members who voted against the proposal said they support paper records but don’t think the risk of widespread voting machine meltdowns is great enough to rush the requirement into place and overwhelm state election boards.

“They should be longer-range goals,” said Britain Williams of the National Association of Election Directors. “You are talking about basically a reinstallation of the entire voting system hardware.”

Congress created the panel after vote-counting problems in the 2000 presidential election to advise the Election Assistance Commission. Monday’s meeting was held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is advising the panel on voting technology. NIST staffers wrote last week’s report on the potential voting problems.

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