"Election 2006: Do you know how your vote will be counted?" Great article!

[Amaryllis]

ELECTION 2006
Do You Know How Your Vote Will Be Counted?
the Washington Spectator
Online Edition
By Warren Stewart | March 1, 2006

Since the 2000 presidential election mess, we've checked in periodically on the vital issues of voter fraud, election reform and the rapid spread of electronic voting machines (see, most recently, our June 15, 2005, and April 15, 2005 issues). Critics have raised serious concerns about the safety of electronic voting; yet more and more states seem to be rushing to embrace this technology.

Battles over electronic voting have been raging recently at the state level, largely out of the view of major media. We asked the knowledgeable Warren Stewart to give our readers a primer on the troubles inherent in electronic voting and to catch us up on reform efforts still underway in several states. Stewart is the Director of Legislative Issues and Policy at VoteTrust USA, a non-partisan national organization that advocates for election integrity and e-voting reform.

The troubling truth about voting in America today is that a majority of the electorate casts their ballots on computers that run software that is hidden from public view and lacks any independent means of verification. The process by which our votes are cast and counted is controlled by private corporations to an extent that threatens the foundations of democracy.

Last September, the Government Accountability Office released a report on the security and reliability of electronic voting machines. The report, which detailed the findings of a nine-month study, said that "concerns about electronic voting machines have been realized and have caused problems with recent elections, resulting in the loss and miscount of votes." The GAO reported that it had confirmed instances of "weak security controls, system design flaws, inadequate system version control, inadequate security testing, incorrect system configuration, poor security management, and vague or incomplete voting system standards."

While acknowledging that efforts were under way to improve the situation, the report warned that "these actions are unlikely to have a significant effect in the 2006 federal election cycle." Not exactly reassuring.

<snip>

Fundamental to the argument against electronic voting is that there is no opportunity to observe the counting of votes. When using DREs, the recording and counting of votes is performed by software—software that is considered "proprietary" by the voting machine vendors, and that is therefore kept secret even from election officials. Not only is the software secret, but the process by which it is tested and the results of that testing are also secret. The laboratories that test the software and hardware are paid by the vendors, but of course all these financial transactions are—you guessed it—secret.

http://www.washingtonspectator.com/index.cfm for the rest