Voting machines "cannot be made secure"

A new report decries the state of the country's electronic voting equipment.

Published December 1, 2006 2:42PM (EST)

A draft report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology confirms what many of us already suspected: There's a serious problem with our electronic voting machines.

The report, according to a story in the Washington Post, condemns specifically those voting machines that leave no paper trail, and recommends that optical scan machines or electronic machines with a paper printout be used instead.

The report, which will be debated next week by a committee set up by Congress to determine standards for the machines, says that the inability of some of the electronic machines to provide a hard-copy record of each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections."


By Alex Koppelman

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon.

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