More Calls to Vet Voting Machines
Louise Witt
Wired News 08/04/03

A recent report that showed touch-screen voting machines could be vulnerable to hackers spurred the National Association of Secretaries of State, a majority of whose members are in charge of their states' elections, to consider whether the standards for the machines should be beefed up to prevent tampering.

Voting machine standards weren't on the agenda at the association's annual meeting, held in late July in Portland, Maine. But after the study by Johns Hopkins University researchers was publicly released, the group discussed asking the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, the government's standards-setting organization, to prepare a white paper on security standards for the new generation of computerized voting machines.

--snip

Computer scientists have raised concerns about the security of computerized voting machines for the past few years, but they haven't been able to gather much support from election officials, who remain confident that the systems are basically secure from tampering and breakdowns. The Johns Hopkins study is the first piece of evidence that current touch-screen technology could be seriously flawed.

While stressing that more studies will have to be conducted to find out just how vulnerable these are, "there is a sense that in the past (critics of computerized machines) were part of the black box crowd and conspiracy theorists," Albowicz said. "No one is saying that now."

Editor's Note: Well, halleluiah ... now we are getting somewhere! The National Association of Secretaries of State putting this on the agenda is very good news and means that this issue is finally beginning to be taken seriously by the people who have some power to get something done about it! Now we just have to keep this on the front burner and in the news so that it will be impossible for them to ignore it or sweep it under the rug! It is imperative that we get something done about these machines before election 2004!

Read Article