E-voting coalition debuts as California mandates changes

IDG News Service - A host of computer scientists and activists today joined forces to form the National Committee on Voting Integrity (NCVI) and threw down the gauntlet to U.S. presidential candidates, inviting them to take a position on the issue of electronic voting.
The group seeks to require a mechanism for voters to verify ballot choices rather than simply enter them via a touch screen without confirmation, as many current DRE (direct recording electronic) systems do.
The NCVI's stance will be validated today by the California secretary of state, Kevin Shelley. A spokeswoman in Shelley's office confirmed that later this afternoon a statement will be released calling for voter-verified systems to be used throughout the state, the most populous in the U.S. The secretary of state is responsible for certifying voting systems for use in California.
"Verified voting" systems, as called for by the NCVI, will provide an independent paper audit trail for elections that are otherwise generally lacking in the new systems, according to the group.
The letter being sent by the NCVI today to candidates states, in part, "We are writing to you regarding the integrity of the voting machines in the United States. It is our view that some of the technologies that have been adopted to tabulate votes, both before and after the 2000 Presidential election, pose a significant risk to the integrity of the democratic process in the United States. We write to you specifically to ask your views on this matter. What steps do you believe should be taken to ensure the integrity of voting?"
The group will post responses on its Web site, www.votingintegrity.org.
The NCVI is chiefly concerned with new computerized voting systems, many of which are being acquired as voting districts across the nation seek to comply with the requirements of the Help America Vote Act of 2002. A Nov. 4 report from the Congressional Research Service of the U.S. Library of Congress (download PDF) also raised concerns about the reliability and security of the systems.
Committee members include Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and part of a team that examined code said to come from Diebold Inc., a major vendor of DRE systems. The team's analysis found the voting system to be "far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts" and raised issues such as the ability to improperly grant users higher access privileges than they are authorized, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes,according to an abstract of its report, published in July (download PDF).
Diebold has issued its own rebuttal to the report (download PDF).
"We all realize how important elections are in this country," said the NCVI's chairman, Peter Neumann, during the group's inaugural news conference today. "The computer systems used should be as reliable and high in integrity as possible."