__Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems

[realFedUp]

__Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a little-known but important federal agency. On December 10-11, 2003, NIST will host a "Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems." Naturally, we would start by indicting Katherine Harris, Jeb Bush, and George W. Bush - but that isn't on their agenda, which focuses on purely "technical" issues. If you live in the DC area and you care about paper audit trails for electronic voting machines, you should attend.
http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/confpage/new031210.htm

(thanks, democrats.com)

[ShimokitaJer]

1. It looks interesting, but $170!?!

Charging that much to attend, it seems pretty clear that they're only interested in those with a financial stake in the issue rather than the regular voters who care about the integrity of the system. And call me cynical, but with a title like that, it sounds like their main interest is in convincing people the system is secure rather than actually making the system secure.

[AndyTiedye]

2. I Might Be Confident in a System that is Open Source and has a Paper Trail

We can all be confident that the current system is being hacked.

[RedEagle]

3. NIST is Very Important

As I understand it, NIST will be the major player in new standards and certification. IEEE wil be represented, but NIST is the main one.

Now, let's see if the voting vendors try to get control of NIST like they are trying with IEEE.

[ShimokitaJer]

4. It sounds like they've already got them

Doesn't "building trust" sound more like a marketing scheme than an investigation. I think we need to start by "building reliability into" the system before we try to "build trust" in it.

[RedEagle]

5. Extremely good point

You can't build trust without something to base it on.

Makes it sound like now we're supposed to build an image on top of an image.