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NIST to recommend decertifying direct record electronic voting
We weren't sure that our government would ever actually, you know, listen to the people that it apparently serves -- at least so far as electronic voting goes. That may soon change, given that internetnews.com is reporting that the National Institute of Standards and Technology will recommend "the 2007 version of the Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) decertify direct record electronic (DRE) machines." (Those would be the non-"software independent" boxes whose votes cannot be audited and certified, yet which are used in 30% of jurisdictions.) Why the sudden change of heart? Well, apparently all of the attention that's been put on the lack of a paper trail or some kind of verified voting system has actually made a difference -- huh, fancy that. Of course, predictably, there remains a naysayer in the midst, an election expert named Roy Saltman, who told internetnews.com: "If you insist on paper you're tying elections to an old technology." Um, Mr. Saltman, that may be true, but until we can get our new tech to work as well as our old tech, then the new tech is sorta useless, isn't it?[Via Techdirt]
