The mission of the Oregon Voter Rights Coalition is to restore public ownership and oversight of elections, and to ensure the fundamental right of every American citizen to vote and to have each vote counted as intended in a secure, transparent, impartial, and independently verified election process.
OPINION: NIST Reaches Unavoidable Conclusion: Paperless DREs Not Acceptable
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 12/16/2006 - 11:31am
by David Dill, Verified Voting -December 1, 2006
In January, 2003, after a month of development, I released a document called the "Resolution on Electronic Voting." I felt that most computer scientists would feel as I did about electronic voting, and I wanted them to speak out. I assumed that when leading computer scientists in the U.S. expressed a nearly unanimous opinion about the proper use of computers, their words would be heeded.
I asked everyone who seemed to know what they were talking about, and incorporated their ideas and sometimes their wording. Near the end of this process, some of the people I approached said it was too long, so I boiled it down to a one-paragraph summary:
"Computerized voting equipment is inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. It is therefore crucial that voting equipment provide a voter-verifiable audit trail, by which we mean a permanent record of each vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter before the vote is submitted, and is difficult or impossible to alter after it has been checked. Many of the electronic voting machines being purchased do not satisfy this requirement. Voting machines should not be purchased or used unless they provide a voter-verifiable audit trail; when such machines are already in use, they should be replaced or modified to provide a voter-verifiable audit trail. Providing a voter-verifiable audit trail should be one of the essential requirements for certification of new voting systems."
(The full resolution is at VerifiedVoting.org. Over 2000 technologists, including some of the nation's most prestigious individuals in the fields of computer science and computer security, endorsed the Resolution.)
Now, almost four years later, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose official duties include providing technical advice about elections under the Help America Vote Act, has produced a document saying essentially the same thing.
This report was a complete surprise, and outstandingly good news.
NIST has examined the issue carefully, weighing the arguments on both sides, and come to conclusions that are the unavoidable consequence of such an examination. Read the Entire Article
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