The First Federally Certified Voting System 68
InternetVoting writes "The Election Assistance Commission has announced the first ever federally certified voting system. While the Election Management System (EMS) 4.0 by MicroVote General Corporation has successfully completed 17 months of testing, many questions still remain about the United States' voting system Testing and Certification program. Many systems are still being tested to obsolete standards, the current standards are set to become obsolete soon and cost estimates for future certifications are skyrocketing. The future of improved innovating voting systems does not look bright."
One huge problem is the labs..."fail" all over 'em (Score:4, Interesting)
Some have even been booted out of the process for poor performance, most recently when NIST (National Institute of Science and Technology) started looking at them. Systest was just kicked out, see this story and links from there for details:
http://www.bbvforums.org/cgi-bin/forums/board-auth.cgi?file=/1954/79428.html [bbvforums.org]
Cyber was so bad, you could jam a cheap pocket calculator halfway into a banana, pay 'em enough money and they'd have declared it "an acceptable election technology" or somedamnthing.
Re:They slso sold un-certified gear - and got bust (Score:4, Interesting)
Good to know.
And realistically, wouldn't a paper ballot and a pencil be the first federally certified voting system?
Or was that method so simple that no certification was deemed necessary?
I'm not an American, so I'm making some assumptions here, and I'd really be interested in knowing this.
If paper and pencil are certified, why the need for a second system?
If paper and pencil are not certified, why the need for a system that's so complex that it needs certification in the first place?
(Probably preaching to the converted with that last question, but still.....)
Re:Show me... (Score:1, Interesting)
Why? You can't even prove that the machine that you're using to cast your vote is using the binary that was compiled from a particular source code, or that the processor abides by its specification and doesn't switch to internal memory when it encounters a specific sequence of commands. This whole certification business is hogwash. Either you trust the companies or you don't. If you don't trust them, you can't use their machines. Ask the DoD how that works.