FW: NIST Calls for Decertification of Paperless Voting Machines

["Pete Klammer" <pklammer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the
group that oversees voting standards, has issued a paper that calls
for the decertification of paperless electronic voting (technically,
direct record electronic (DRE)) machines.

Their conclusion is that DRE vote totals cannot be audited because
the machines are not software independent.  In other words, there is
no way to verify the vote totals other than by relying on the
software that tabulated the results in the first place.  As a result,
the current DREs are "more vulnerable to undetected programming
errors or malicious code."

The paper is available here:
http://vote.nist.gov/DraftWhitePaperOnSIinVVSG2007-20061120.pdf