VoteTrustUSA: The Long Road to a Reliable Voting System [View All]

[Wilms]

The Long Road to a Reliable Voting System

By Warren Stewart, VoteTrustUSA

April 01, 2006

Among their many activities, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) chairs the Election Assistance Commission's Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). The TGDC is responsible for the development of the nation's Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG), which although optional for the states, are pretty much mandatory for e-voting vendors who are expected to build to these standards. This is one reason why Diebold's use of interpreted code which is in violation of these standards, has come under so much scrutiny.

As previously reported one aspect of the VVSG itself that is severely deficient is its Hardware Reliability spec that allows almost 10% of e-voting systems to fail in any 15-hour Election Day. Such failures, especially of touch screen machines, have resulted in voter disenfranchisement, possibly even affecting the outcome of elections.

Suggestions for improving this standard (which dates back to 1990) made by experts such as Dr. Stanley A. Klein, Dr. Rebecca Mercuri and Alfred DuPlessis (a bona fide Reliability Engineer) as early as 2002, appear to have fallen on deaf ears in both the IEEE Voting Systems Standards Committee as well as the EAC itself as recently as last year when this issue was raised in public comments on the 2005 VVSG.

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Howard Stanislevic, a computer network engineer and research consultant for the VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project said of the recent opinion by NIST, "I am very happy that the voting systems Reliablity issue was raised by Dr. Goldfine, who stated that there is now a consensus within NIST that this standard should be improved. The issue now is by how much, at what cost, and most importantly, when? Clearly, the current standard is inadequate."

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http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1151&Itemid=26