As the qualification testing process evolved and tested systems were used in the field, NASED’s Voting Systems Committee identified standards and testing issues that needed to be resolved. In February of 1997, Christopher Thomas, then President of NASED, and Thomas Wilkey, Chairman of NASED’s Voting Systems Committee, briefed Commissioners on the need for continuing FEC involvement to address standards and testing issues raised by the independent test authorities, as well as to keep the national standards up-to-date.
http://www.uselections.com/voting/history.htmWilkey under fire for clandestine testing of voting machines.
On its Web site, the association says the three testing outfits "have neither the staff nor the time to explain the process to the public, the news media or jurisdictions." It directs inquiries to a Houston-based nonprofit organization, the Election Center, that assists election officials. The center's executive director, Doug Lewis, did not return telephone messages seeking comment.
The election directors' voting systems board chairman, former New York State elections director Thomas Wilkey, said the testers' secrecy stems from the FEC's refusal to take the lead in choosing them and the government's unwillingness to pay for it.
He said that left election officials no choice but to find technology companies willing to pay.
"When we first started this program it took us over a year to find a company that was interested, then along came Wyle, then CIBER and then SysTest," Wilkey said of he standards developed over five years and adopted in 1990.
"Companies that do testing in this country have not flocked to the prospect of testing voting machines," said U.S. Election Assistance Commission chairman DeForest Soaries Jr., now the top federal overseer of voting technology.
A 2002 law, the Help America Vote Act, created the four-member, bipartisan headed by Soaries to oversee a change to easier and more secure voting.
Soaries said there should be more testers but the three firms are "doing a fine job with what they have to work with."
Wilkey, meanwhile, predicted "big changes" in the testing process after the November election.
But critics led by Stanford University computer science professor David Dill say it's an outrage that the world's most powerful democracy doesn't already have an election system so transparent its citizens know it can be trusted.
"Suppose you had a situation where ballots were handed to a private company that counted them behind a closed door and burned the results," said Dill, founder of VerifiedVoting.org. "Nobody but an idiot would accept a system like that. We've got something that is almost as bad with electronic voting."
Wilkey is an executive director of the US Election Assistance Commission.
Former state Board of Elections Executive Director Thomas Wilkey, a Democrat, may not pass muster with Pataki to head New York's Help America Vote Act task force, but he is highly regarded at the federal level.
Wilkey, of Rensselaer, retired from his state post in 2003 -- not long after Pataki passed him over as task force head in favor of the board's Deputy Executive Director Peter Kosinski, who is a Republican. He has been chosen to serve as executive director of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
The EAC is an independent, bipartisan commission created under HAVA to administer federal money to states to help them modernize their elections systems, adopt voting system guidelines and implement election administration improvements.
Wilkey's four-year term as the EAC's executive director begins June 20.
http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=363115&category=CAPCONF&BCCode=&newsdate=6/22/2005
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