Voting System Certification: Who’s Minding the Store?

[Wilms]

Voting System Certification: Who’s Minding the Store?

By Howard Stanislevic, VoteTrustUSA E-Voter Education Project

January 09, 2007

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The loophole, which appears in Volume II, Appendix B.5 of the 2002 version of the guidelines states that any uncorrected deficiency observed in the qualification test results that does not involve the loss or corruption of voting data is not necessarily cause for rejection of a voting system. This loophole means that the EAC and the nongovernmental agency that qualified voting systems to these standards through July, 2006, the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED), were free to disregard any part of these standards, except for the accuracy (error rate) spec which is also a statutory requirement of Section 301 of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

snip

Revelations about other vendors’ noncompliance may follow, but the question also arises as to whether NASED has been giving voting systems that do not comply with the standards a pass by using the loophole that the EAC has preserved for itself and whether the so-called “Independent Testing Authority” (ITA) laboratories have been failing to adequately test systems in accordance with those standards. The experience of one state (New York) with one ITA (Ciber, Inc.) may shed some light on these questions.

snip

Unlike NASED and the EAC, the New York State Board of Elections has actually been requiring compliance with the voting system standards and not invoking the giant loophole noted above. This experience shows that when voting system laws and regulations are actually taken seriously, the certification process is a lot more rigorous than what the ITAs have become accustomed to while working only for the vendors with only election integrity advocates minding the store.

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http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2173&Itemid=113

[Melissa G]

1. Thank Goodness for the patriots around this place who are minding

the store and preserving democracy! Thanks for the post, wilms! K&R! :patriot:

[kster]

2. K&R.. nt

[Bill Bored]

3. kick nt