Representatives of the computer vote-counting industry are unfairly dominating the standard-setting process, say critics.By Farhad Manjoo
Sept. 29, 2003 | When the
IEEE, the world's leading professional society of engineers, decided in the summer of 2001 to create a technical standard for electronic voting machines, most everyone concerned with the elections business thought it was a grand idea.
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Advocates of the audit-trail requirement claim that the
IEEE standards group has been hijacked by a "cabal" representing the voting equipment industry; this industry coalition has systematically attempted to "disenfranchise" its critics by abusing technicalities in the meeting bylaws, these activists charge.
"I think they do want to prevent stronger security methods from going into the standard," says
David Dill, a computer scientist at Stanford who is one of the leading advocates of verifiable ballots in electronic systems. "I feel that we are being deliberately shut out of the process."
Rebecca Mercuri, a computer scientist and a research fellow at Harvard who has long questioned the security in electronic voting systems, says that the entire standards process has been shrouded in secrecy. "It's not just the fact that they have all these rules," she says. "We could live with the rules. But when someone asks for a clarification of the rules, they change the rules to suit their purposes."
Is the voting equipment industry trying to silence its opponents in a standards group that has traditionally been committed to openness? That's hard to say definitively; none of the industry officials on the voting-machine group -- including
Herb Deutsch, who is the chair of the committee charged with drafting the standard and an employee of
Elections Systems & Software, the world's largest voting company -- responded to Salon's requests for comment. But in interviews, several members of the committee who have called for tough security in voting systems pointed to specific "irregularities" in the standards process: People have been given conflicting and confusing instructions on how to join the group; some members appear to have been accorded preferential treatment; the committee's leaders have used some technically legal but not very nice parliamentary procedures to prevent opponents from expressing their views; and when critics of the industry have managed to make comments, they appear to have been summarily ignored.
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http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/29/voting_machine_standards/index.html (subscription required)
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