Further intertwinings amongst the voting machine owners, trade organizations, lobbyists, training organizations and standards groups - "incestuous" is not to strong a word to define these relationships. Why we don't have paper trails and why they don't want us to have them.
Ever heard of The Election Center? Or Doug Lewis? Or the Electronic Technology Council? Or the Election Assistance Commission? Or the IEEE’s voting-equipment-standards working group?
We need to get real familiar with these groups.
"Paper Trail" - Don’t Count on It!
<snip>
This is due, in large part, to a curious nonprofit entity called the Election Center and its versatile executive director, Doug Lewis. The Election Center’s members include approximately 1,000 dues-paying state and local election-administration officials, as well some voting-machine vendors.
But in the eyes of many voting-rights activists, the Election Center (and Lewis in particular) acts as a tireless advocate for the industry’s interests. In March, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the center has received tens of thousands of dollars from the major voting-machine vendors in the United States. Lewis also had a hand in forming the e-voting industry’s trade association. In August of 2003, Lewis and Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the country’s largest IT trade association, hosted a conference call with the presidents of the major e-voting-machine vendors. (re: paper trails)
<snip>
In the conference call, Lewis, Miller, and the executives banded together to form a coherent public-relations counteroffensive under the auspices of a new trade association, later called the Electronic Technology Council, to be created as a subsidiary of the ITAA; membership was to be around $100,000 per company. On the council’s Web site, an official statement of neutrality on the issue of voter-verified paper ballots is quickly followed by a long list of reasons why such a requirement would, in fact, be onerous.
Considering that Lewis’ organization’s members are election officials who serve a public trust, Lewis’ critics cite his participation in creating the Electronic Technology Council as an apparent conflict of interest. If true, this has only become compounded since June 2004, when Lewis was elected chairman of the Board of Advisors for the Election Assistance Commission, a federal body created by HAVA to oversee the bill’s implementation.
<snip>
the authors of HAVA mandated that the Election Assistance commission pass a new set of guidelines by 2006. <snip> this process has been hijacked by industry representatives who serve on the working group and are manipulating the standards to serve their own profit-expanding ends. <snip> it now appears that the standards the group is proposing are likely to be approved by the Election Assistance Commission in 2006, without the security provisions demanded by independent academics, computer-programming experts, and activists.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=V...(This was previously posted as "Why we're not going to get a paper trail", retitled & reposted)
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