IEEE members: save electronic voting from a broken standards-committee!
From Smart Mobs, discussion of the EFF campaign to prevent a standards committee on electronic voting from being manipulated and misled by those very companies who make the voting machines. These standards will be used for years to come, and if the fix is in at this level, well, I wouldn’t trust the voting machines much, would you?
The IEEE, normally the sobersided epitome of integrity and accountability, has had one of its standards-committees jump the tracks.
The people who are writing the IEEE standard for voting machines have been doing their best to rig their deliberative process to exclude input from non-vendors who want the standard to include performance metrics that will guard against electoral malfeasance. This is heavy stuff: the standard this committee produces will likely form the basis of the US goverment’s voting-machine purchases (as well as those of governments abroad), and if there are holes in the standard today, they will be biting our democracies on the ass for decades. There’s never been a clearer demonstration that “architecture is politics.”
IEEE is better than this. If you’re a member of the organization, please take a moment to read up on this disaster-in-the-making and then use the form at the EFF’s action-center to write to the IEEE and ask them to investigate this — before it’s too late.
Even more problematic, the standard fails to require or even recommend that voting machines be truly voter verified or verifiable, a security measure that has broad support within the computer security community.
To make matters worse, EFF has received reports of serious procedural problems with the P1538 and SCC 38 Committee processes, including shifting roadblocks placed in front of those who wish to participate and vote, and failure to follow basic procedural requirements.We’ve heard claims that the working group and committee leadership is largely controlled by representatives of the electronic voting machine vendor companies and others with vested interests.