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New Jersey Lawsuit Challenges Electronic Voting
More than three million registered voters in 15 of New Jersey's 21 counties are scheduled to use the electronic voting machines, which have been dogged nationwide by concerns over their reliability and fairness. Five New Jersey counties use the old mechanical lever machines, like the ones in use in New York and Connecticut. One New Jersey county uses optically scanned ballots. Most counties also have optical scan machines in place for handling absentee ballots, and the draft lawsuit suggests the expanded use of these in lieu of the electronic machines.

A large turnout in any precinct followed by unconfirmed voting recounts may create problems on the scale of the FL fiasco. Much of this is traceable to voting officials (political appointees) who have as much technical knowledge as women do about skin creams. The fate of a country does not depend on half truths and outright lies from the Pond's Institute. But it does depend on machines that can produce verifiable confirmation - ie a paper record - for the recount. Unfortunately, many voting machines that meet the 'paper record' requirement do not produce paper records that can be used for a recount. Still waiting, for example, is the manufacturer of those voting machines in Montgomery County PA that were reported to be

very reliable and they post the count from each machine at the end of the night. My ex was an election official so I've seen it. This is a pretty good system. It is pretty hard to massively fraud these things as far as I can see.

This is just the reasoning that scares me - decisions made without machines even conforming to a standard. A visual examination deemed sufficient to declare reliability. Exactly the mental attitude of politically appointed voting officials that would be symptoms of the problem. That problem begins with political parties who control the elections.

from IEEE Spectrum of Oct 2004
Officials are knowingly giving up the ability to perform an independent recount - a fundamental requirement for ensuring the integrity of the votes recorded by a voting machine, and for reconstructing the tally if an electrion is contested. People using these direct-recording systems will have no assurance that their ballots were cast at all, let alone as inteneded. And it's likely that some machines will fail, if the record of recent local and other elections is any guide. ...

One logical legislative oppurtunity was in the language of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, which fueled the rush to electronic voting throughout the United States, with more than $3billion to be used by state and local governments to replace their old punch card and lever systems. And additional $30 million of HAVA money was suppose to have been allocated to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD to support the development of more stringent election system examination criteria than those develeoped by the Federal Election Commission in 1990 and 2002.

Unfortunately, the NIST funding was not distributed, and technical commission appointments were stalled. Even if a more timely standard had been produced, the cart was put before the horse: receipt of HAVA monies for equipment purcahses was not linked to compliance with any new HAVA requirements. As a consequence, no machine currently in use has HAVA certification, since no certification actually exists, nor, once it does exist, is it likely to be enforceable by 2006, the deadline set by HAVA for all new systems to be in place.

Although HAVA requires that newly purcahsed voting units "produce a permanent paper record with a manual audit capacity for such system," electrion officials and vendors have let this clause be satiffied by just a paper strip on which vote totals are printed at the end of the election. That strip would be useless if a real recount were required. US Representative Robert Wexler of election-impaired Palm Beach FL refers to this printed summary as a "reprint" rather than a "recount".