The Security Mentor

For some reason the national organization hasn't acknowledged this yet. Their convention of local and regional organizations passed a resolution calling for voting machines to meet some standards of trustworthiness.

Details in the League of Women Voters post on security guru Bruce Schneier's blog.

The word to remember from the resolution is "SARA": "Secure, Accurate, Recountable, and Accessible". "Accessible" means the disabled can use the system -- this is, in fact, a big advantage of electronic voting machines. "Secure" and "Accurate" you don't need me to explain, but "Recountable" deserves a comment. Suppose a question comes up about whether a voting machine is malfunctioning, buggy, or even tampered with. How do you do a recount? Run the machine again to get the same wrong answer? "Recountable" means there has to be an indepedent record that you can use to check the machine's answers if there's ever a question. Paper is great for that.