E-Voting Testing Labs Not Independent

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4 responses to “E-Voting Testing Labs Not Independent”

1. Cypherpunk

   June 2, 2004

   I think you have slightly twisted the facts here. “There are only three labs, and they are overseen by a private body that is supported financially by the vendors.”

   In principle, the labs are overseen by the National Association of State Election Directors, a quasi-governmental organization. In practice, NASED does not have the resources to do the oversight itself, so it has delegated the task to The Election Center, a private training organization for elected officials. Of the Center’s $462,000 budget, up to $10,000 came from donations by the vendors. This is a very small contribution but your wording makes it sound like the vendors are running the testing labs.

   More seriously, The Election Center is no longer involved with the process as of last year, meaning that the labs presently have no effective oversight. But that doesn’t fit the facts of your tidy foxes-running-the-henhouse story.

   The larger problem is that the federal election standards are somewhat obsolete and that enforcement of them was never funded. That’s the real story here.

   As far as the use of independent testing labs, I can say from experience that this is the norm in other areas of security certification. These testing companies are paid by the vendors whose products they are evaluating. Theoretically the testors are overseen by the federal government, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the facts are much the same as in the election case, with a lack of funding for this theoretical oversight process making the testing labs effectively autonomous, and financially beholden to the companies who are their clients.

   The truth is that almost no social process can withstand sufficient scrutiny. You have turned your attention to election machines and found major problems. You could do the same in any other part of life.

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2. aNonMooseCowherd

   June 2, 2004

   You wrote: “It seems to me that state election officials should be able to get together and establish a truly independent testing procedure that has some teeth.” Better yet, the states could get together and develop their own voting software and make it open source. Then they would get lots of people auditing it for free.

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3. joe

   June 2, 2004

   to Cypherpunk: what social process is more important to democracy than elections? If we get one thing right, should it not be this?

   As well, I wonder: What would the states need from the vendors to ensure security of their machines? Source code? Design documentation? Hardware documentation?

   Granted, as Saltman has said, it’s the system combined with the machines that could cause problems.

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4. David Jefferson

   June 4, 2004

   To the best of my knowledge the income statement for The Election Center has never been published. It is true that one outright donation of $10,000 by a vendor has recently come to light, but that is not to say that there were not others, and I’d be surprised if there were not. In any case The Election Center must derive other income indirectly from vendors, e.g. from the trade show floor space it provides to vendors at conferences.

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