It looks like Senator Diane Feinstein is requesting that a pair of federal agencies, the General Accounting Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, examine the voting machines in Florida District 13. It is as yet unknown whether both the hardware and software will be under scrutiny. Theres more from the St. Pete Times:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, is asking the General Accountability Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to conduct “top to bottom investigation” of the machines in Sarasota County.
Feinstein’s remarks came during a Senate Rules Committee hearing on electronic election reform that largely focused on the race between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings.
“Now, there are those who say it’s impossible to adopt meaningful security and verifiability requirements for the 2008 election,” she said. “But one only has to look at what happened in Sarasota to see how dangerous it might be to wait.”
Buchanan was sworn in to office last month but Jennings continues to dispute her slim loss both in the Florida courts and in Congress.
While this development is somewhat reassuring for advocates of transparency in elections, Florida law still protects the voting machine vendors from opening up their machines because of supposed “trade secrets”. I guess trade secrets is a melange of crappy software and unsecured hardware. I’m glad that Crist is moving towards verifiable paper trails and the elimination of unreliable touch screen voting, but is he really serious about ensuring fair elections? Where does he stand on FL-13? These measures will benefit voters in the long term, but are we just expected to let bygones be bygones?
