December 05, 2006

"Federal Panel Rebuffs Guidelines That Insist on a Paper Trail"

"A federal advisory group rejected a measure yesterday that would have discouraged states from using electronic voting systems that lack an independent means of verifying their results, according to a spokeswoman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Members of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a group created by Congress to advise the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, deadlocked 6 to 6 on the proposal at a meeting held at the NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg. Eight votes are needed to pass a measure on the 15-member committee.

NIST spokeswoman Jan Kosko said the proposal was introduced by Ronald Rivest, a computer science professor at MIT who heads a subcommittee on transparency and security.

Rivest told committee members that software errors in paperless machines could go undetected, leading to a situation in which "an election result is wrong and you have no evidence to show that it's wrong."

Posted by Randy Riddle at December 5, 2006 07:43 AM