In the wake of the California report released last week showing that Red Team security researchers were able to hack voting machines from three of the top voting machine companies, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) announced today that the Senate Rules and Administration Committee will hold a hearing in September to examine the report's findings. From the press release:
One wonders where the senator has been the last four years that she's surprised by the findings revealed in the report. Feinstein introduced a bill earlier this year that would require voting machines nationwide to produce a paper trail, but the bill has received little support in the Senate thus far.
Another bill that Congressman Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) introduced in the House years ago (and reintroduced this year) is making better progress, though its path has hardly been smooth. As I reported two weeks ago, the bill almost died due to arguments among interest groups over sections of the bill dealing with the paper trail mandate and voter accessibility. A compromise was apparently reached this week (see the draft version that's been circulating on the internet), but voting activists are steaming mad with it since it would allow touch-screen machines with add-on printers to continue to be used. The machines use thermal paper, such as the kind used in cash registers.
Voting activist groups fought hard to get those printers in place in 2003 and 2004 and were the impetus for the original Holt bill back in 2003 which would have mandated that printers be installed on all touch-screen machines. But the activists have since changed their minds and now want touch-screen machines outlawed entirely and replaced with optical-scan machines that use a durable full-size paper ballot. The revised bill introduced this year initially seemed to suggest that touch-screen machines would be outlawed, but that wording in the bill has since changed to permit counties to use the touch-screen machines with printers.
