The Electronic Frontier Foundation is asking that the IEEE standards effort aimed at developing an electronic voting technology be slowed down and reconsidered. The would-be standard, IEEE 1583, is heavily influenced by the Department of Defense, which is providing the technology that will be used by a number of states in the 2004 election. Voters cannot verify their votes, eliminating any chance of auditing elections fairly.
"Members of the security community report that the current standard is flawed. P1583 is largely a design standard, describing how to configure current electronic voting machines, instead of a performance standard setting benchmarks and processes for testing the security, reliability, accessibility, and accuracy of these machines. "
As I reported at Correspondences.org on July 15, the Department of Defense is behind the technology that a dozen states will use in 2004, which is troubling in a number of dimensions. This story has been underreported by the press--the most politicized department of the Bush Administration should not be handling election technology.
Posted by Mitch Ratcliffe at September 23, 2003 09:47 AM | TrackBack