Second-gen voting machines to be ‘software independent,’ but no move to replace installed machines

Kudos to Engadget for keeping up with e-voting, especially since they’re more of a tech-geek-toy kinda site. I like to think that maybe more than a few people who would have been unconcerned have learned a bit about the problems with the current voting machines installed in many states. First, Engadget reported that the NIST Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) didn’t get enough votes to recommend decertifying machines with no paper trail. It was looking pretty grim for the NIST study that pretty much made the current machines look like crap. Today Engadget says the feds have changed their minds a little. The TGDC will recommend that the next generation of machines be software independent. In other words, they must be equipped with a voter-verifiable paper trail. The bad news is that they still won’t decertify existing machines that don’t meet the software independence test. That means people in places like my home state of Georgia may be stuck with hackable, unreliable voting machines for some time. At least until enough people here make enough noise. Also learned from Engadget: Secretary of State Cathy Cox handed over the reins to Diebold when we got voting machines here, in what looks to me like a very shady deal. Or as Engadget calls it, “extremely skeezy.”