Throwing Away the DRE eVOTE Machines

The foundation of any democracy has to be free and fair election. I have written considerably about the danger the over-priced, insecure and non-verifiable DRE eVote machines are. By now you'd think the evidence was more than enough to kill any interest any state might have in these machines.

To me one of the deciding factors should be the fact that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has advocated the decertification of these machines because:

According to an NIST paper to be discussed at a meeting of election regulators at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md., on Dec. 4 and 5, DRE vote totals cannot be audited because the machines are not software independent.

In other words, there is no means of verifying vote tallies other than by relying on the software that tabulated the results to begin with.

The machines currently in use are "more vulnerable to undetected programming errors or malicious code," according to the paper.

The NIST paper also noted that, "potentially, a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."

But there recently is yet more evidence that the DRE machines suck. Florida under Jeb Bush was a state that embraced the DRE machines early. Perhaps Jeb should have waited. DRE machines are probably responsible for an 18,000 vote undercount in Florida's FL-13 Congressional race in 2006 which more or less made those election results a farce.

Florida's new governor probably also wishes Jeb Bush had waited before buying all those extremely expensive DRE machines, because he now wants to throw out the DRE machines and buy the main alternative technology, PB/OS (Paper Ballot/Optical Scan) machines. Now PB/OS machines also have problems, but ultimately they do have a paper trail that is verifiable, they are cheaper and more reliable than the DRE machines.

What about YOUR state? Is YOUR state learning from the lesson of Florida? Or is your state considering buying the over-priced, easily hackable, unrelaible pieces of crap called DRE eVote machines? Go to Verified Voting.org and find out.

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