New Law: No Paper trail needed

by: Jason Springer

Fri Mar 06, 2009 at 06:48:08 PM EST

The Governor's office put this out in a release this afternoon:

Governor Jon S. Corzine today signed the following bill into law:
A-3648/S-2547 (Quigley, Schaer/Sweeney, O'Toole) - Delays requirement that voting machines produce individual permanent paper record for each vote cast due to the State's critical economic situation and lack of appropriate technology

What, no public bill signing? Maybe they should take a look at the disturbing news from California:

After three months of investigation, California's secretary of state has released a report examining why a voting system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly known as Diebold) lost about 200 ballots in Humboldt County during November's presidential election.
But the most startling information in the state's 13-page report (.pdf) is not why the system lost votes, which Wired.com previously covered in detail, but that some versions of Diebold's vote tabulation system, known as the Global Election Management System (Gems), include a button that allows someone to delete audit logs from the system.
Auditing logs are required under the federal voting-system guidelines, which are used to test and qualify voting systems for use in elections. The logs record changes and other events that occur on voting systems to ensure the integrity of elections and help determine what occurred in a system when something goes wrong.

So no paper trail, delete the logs, did the vote ever really occur? They better hope it doesn't take one of their elections to be the test case.

Jason Springer :: New Law: No Paper trail needed

Tags: Voting, ballot, Diebold, optical scan, voter verified, Paper Trail, featured, (All Tags)

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New Law: No Paper trail needed | 2 comments

The Excuses Are Uncredible (0.00 / 0)

The rationale about money is nonsense, they were perfectly willing to spend lots of money rejiggering the old machines until they were shamed at the hearings I attended at which Rush Holt and many others testified.

Providing secure verifiable elections is one of the key jobs that a government has to do...it's a priority. To curtail the security and verifiability of our electoral process for any reason is an abdication of the sacred trust that elected officials should have with the electorate.

It was clear that the Sequoia Rube Goldberg bubble was pricked and the power structure of the state didn't/doesn't want to go to optical scan which would be cheaper, more secure and yield a paper trail.

Listen to what Rush Holt had to say at the NJ Senate Hearing http://blip.tv/file/1568559

Had there been no testimony and no light shed on those hearings, no doubt the operation with Sequoia would have continued and many millions would have been shelled out. http://www.bluejersey.net/show...

One can only speculate as to their true motivations but a lack of "appropriate technology" doesn't wash. This "law" stinks to high heaven.

by: Nick Lento @ Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 03:47:24 AM UTC

what happens if we get another 1981? (0.00 / 0)

A tight election with a "margin of error" greater than the "margin of victory" will create an uproar. Instead of managing by crisis, it would be better to handle it correctly the first time (or even the second time).

by: Creed Pogue @ Sat Mar 07, 2009 at 17:33:46 PM UTC