December 02, 2005

"Uncertainty clouds future of e-vote tests"

"For 11 years, most states have relied on voting systems tested to minimal federal standards, the results withheld from public scrutiny and given the green light by a nongovernmental agency working on a shoestring budget.

The era of approving tools of democracy on the cheap is coming to an end, and judging by talk at a national gathering of voting experts here this week, few will be sorry to see it go.

Carnegie Mellon University computer expert Michael Shamos, a state voting-systems certification official for Pennsylvania, is one of the staunchest advocates for new, fully computerized electronic voting systems.

But judging by what he has seen emerge from secretive, private labs known as "independent testing authorities" and approved by the National Association of State Elections Directors, Shamos said, "There's stuff in there that's so horrible, I can't understand it."

He found a quarter of the voting systems presented to Pennsylvania unsuitable for elections, with such "glaring failures" as an inability to tally votes correctly. A recent study led by the University of Maryland showed all of six voting systems tested did not record 3 to 4 percent of the votes. What does pass state muster often can break down.

"I have good reason to believe that 10 percent of systems are failing on Election Day. That's an unbelievable number," Shamos told an assemblage of voting-system makers, elections officials and scientists. "Why are we not in an uproar about the failure of (touch-screen voting) systems?"

"Things are getting through the certification process that really shouldn't," said software architect Eric Lazarus of DecisionSmith, a voting-systems consultant for the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

But if voting systems testing is as broken as scientists and voting advocates say, there is wide-ranging debate about what the future should look like. For the next year or two, the way that voting systems reach U.S. counties and voters is not likely to change."

Posted by Randy Riddle at December 2, 2005 01:05 PM