It seems that the Technical Guidelines Development Committee has accepted the NIST recommendations against e-voting after all. As a compromise, the new guidelines apparently emphasize that existing voting machines are grandfathered in.
This strikes me as a reasonable compromise. Obviously, I’d like to see us scrap paperless voting machines for the 2008 election, but there is likely to be substantial political resistance to that idea. Since TGDC doesn’t have the authority to ban paperless voting in any event, the important thing is that they come out with a strong statement that machines without paper trails are insecure. That will give the good guys in individual states the ammunition they need to accelerate the process of phasing out insecure machines.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.