From the
Federal Computer Week
May 23, 2001
E-voting experts put regs first
The federal government should not mandate uniform electronic voting systems, but it should improve the voluntary standards for those systems, a group of experts on voting systems told lawmakers Tuesday.
The federal government should not mandate uniform electronic voting systems, but it should improve the voluntary standards for those systems, a group of experts on voting systems told lawmakers Tuesday.
"The current system of regulation for voting machinery suffers from significant flaws," said Douglas Jones, associate professor of computer science at the University of Iowa and chairman of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems.
That doesn't mean that voting machines should all be immediately replaced, he said. "I cannot recommend large-scale funding for immediate modernization of voting systems across the country," he said. "To do so now would be to rush into the purchase of large numbers of systems that I hope will be found failing by standards we ought to have in place."
"I have identified numerous flaws inherent to the application of computer technology to the democratic process of elections," said Rebecca Mercuri, an assistant professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College ...
Optical scanning devices, ... and electronic voting machines "are not what we would want" to mandate across the country, said Stephen Ansolabehere, a professor of political sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ...
Specifically, all members of the panel said that it is still too early for Internet voting.
Lawmakers seemed to agree ...