Feds eschew e-voting paper trail for the status quo
Remember that recommendation that we expected to see come out of the National Institute of Standards and Technology pretty soon -- you know, the one that would de-certify all those fundamentally flawed direct record electronic voting machines? Well, we apparently spoke too soon, as The Washington Post now reports that the recommendation didn't even make it out of committee. The Technical Guidelines Development Committee, a section within NIST that advises the US Election Assistance Committee, failed to reach the 8 votes necessary to pass the decertification measure. Seriously. Why didn't this blindingly obvious recommendation pass? Well, it's not entirely clear, but committee member Brit Williams, a computer scientist who certified Georgia's electronic voting system (we all know how well that went), said "You are talking about basically a re-installation of the entire voting system hardware." Um, dude, last we checked, if something's broke, you gotta fix it. Seriously, when was the last time you heard about a computer scientist that went out of his or her way to avoid fixing a system they installed? Don't answer that.
[Via Techdirt]
