NIST Recommends against Paperless Voting

by Tim Lee on December 1, 2006 · Comments

Ed Felten reports that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a draft of a report to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee recommending that the next iteration of its voting machine standards not permit the certification of paperless DREs. Given the speed at which the wheels of bureaucracy turn, it appears that would mean that no new paperless voting machines would be certified after the 2008 election. Existing DREs might be grandfathered in for the 2008 election and beyond.

This is great news. As Felten notes, the report recommends against certification of paperless DREs in clear and unambiguous language. It’s particularly important because if a recommendation like this is adopted by an official standards-setting agency of the federal government, it will be awfully hard for the Diebolds of world to demonize the source, as they’ve done with previous critics.

Comments Posted in: E-Government & Transparency

  • Either a paper or a paperless system can be cheated; but the paperless systems have two problems. (1) The cheating, even if more difficult to accomplish, is likely to be more widespread in scope, since multiple machines can be compromised with a single action. (2) There is no way after the fact to determine if there was a problem. The NIST report stresses this point repeatedly.

    Illegal registrants are a problem, but a different one. Each issue has to be dealt with.
  • It is, suprisingly, as easy to cheat a paper system as it is a paperless system.


    This comment barely deserves a response, but it is obvious to all who have followed Ed Felten's work that this is not true. Electronic systems can be compromised many weeks before the election, and there is no way to check. Also, paperless systems can be compromised at a much larger scale, by many orders of magnetude less people involved than a paper based system.


    The obvious antidote to cheating is independant parallel data paths, checksums and other proven tests for data corruption, then real world trials with attempts to cheat and rewards for successful cheats.


    No. There is a real problem with dual data paths, in that there can be only one winner in an election. What to do if the dual data paths give contradictory results? I prefer one path, closely watched and transparent. Transparency excludes all digital methods.

  • Walter_E_Wallis
    It is, suprisingly, as easy to cheat a paper system as it is a paperless system. The obvious antidote to cheating is independant parallel data paths, checksums and other proven tests for data corruption, then real world trials with attempts to cheat and rewards for successful cheats.
    Then we need to approach the illegal registrants. This machine rage is just a cover for the illegally cast votes and everybody knows it.
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