San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an action alert this week warning that electronic voting machines installed without a verifiable paper audit trail and open source software programming are vulnerable to election fraud.
"Touchscreen voting machines can increase accessibility for people with disabilities, reduce the cost of printing multilingual paper ballots, and make the experience of voting less confusing," explained EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "However, without basic auditing checks, electronic voting machines dramatically raise the stakes for insider and hacking attacks resulting in election fraud."
"We need to ensure that no one can hack an election," added EFF Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien. "Electronic voting technology is wonderful, but it must also be verifiable outside the voting booth."
The EFF action alert provides an easy way for the public to write California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and ask him to ensure that California's new touchscreen voting machines have a voter-verifiable paper audit trail, as well as open software source code available for easy and ongoing independent inspection.
EFF recommends that Secretary of State Shelley express support for San Mateo County and other counties that have already taken great strides toward verifiable voting systems and that he require verifiable voting systems for all other California counties.
Cindy Cohn
Legal Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
cindy@eff.org
+1 415 436-9333 x108 (office)
Lee Tien
Senior Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
tien@eff.org
+1 415 436-9333 x102 (office)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression and privacy online. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to websites in the world at http://www.eff.org/
