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.
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