Two items at Computerworld.com.

First, here’s Harris Miller, president of Technology Association of America (ITAA) on the attempts to stop e-voting until the machines are reliable:

It’s not about voting machines. It’s a religious war about open-source software vs. proprietary software..If you’re a computer scientist and you think that open-source software is the solution to everything because you’re a computer scientist and you can spot all flaws, then you hate electronic voting machines. But if you’re a person who believes that proprietary software and open-source software can both be reliable, then you don’t hate electronic voting machines.

Hmm. It’s actually not about hating e-voting machines. It’s about loving elections we can trust. For example, here’s another article from the site today:

A former California political candidate who lost the March 2004 race for Riverside County Board of Supervisors by only 45 votes filed a lawsuit today against the county after she was denied access to the memory and audit logs of the electronic voting systems used during the election.

…The case arose after Soubirous petitioned the county registrar and machine vendor Sequoia Voting Systems for access to the systems’ audit logs, redundant memory, the results of logic and accuracy tests that were conducted on the systems, and the chain-of-custody records for the system components. Despite a California law that permits any voter to request and review “all relevant election materials” pertaining to a recount, Townsend refused to grant Soubirous access to the material, arguing it was not “relevant” to a recount.

How many challenges are we going to have in the November election if we entrust our democracy to machines without paper trails?

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