text: Voters in 14 states will use insecure machines | McClatchy Washington Bureau
  14 states' voting machines are highly vulnerable. How'd that happen? | McClatchy Washington Bureau
  Vicki Shelly, the election administrator in San Jacinto County, Tex., north of Houston, said she received no alert from Washington or state officials before the county spent $383,000 on its new paperless touch-screen voting system made by Hart InterCivic.
  In 2007, rather than addressing NIST's recommendation, the Election Assistance Commission shelved it. The panel, led by former Republican Secretary of State Donetta Davidson of Colorado, acted after an advisory committee comprising more than 100 state and county election officials – some of whose jurisdictions had already bought touch-screens — passed a resolution declaring it "premature" to ban them.
  NIST still stands by its 2006 finding. Jennifer Huergo said in a statement that "auditability is a foundational requirement for voting system security, as it allows for the detection of an incorrect election outcome."
  She did not comment on the decision by EAC to disregard the experts' finding.
  "It was knowingly wrong"
  A federal official familiar with the events since 2006 still is amazed and unsettled by the government's blunders.
  "It was knowingly wrong for Congress to appropriate funds for new systems before better standards could be written and reckless on the part of the EAC to then vote down NIST's update to the standards," said this official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. "Many of the current issues with voting system security could have been rectified years ago."
  EAC said in a statement that states and counties have total control over elections and it serves only in an advisory role through its testing and certification program. EAC has no way, however, to guarantee that touch screens have recorded votes correctly without auditing a paper record.
  Susan Greenhalgh, policy director for the National Election Defense Coalition, called it "scandalous" that EAC ignored NIST's warnings all those years.
  "The bottom line is that no amount of security precautions can ensure a voting system hasn't been manipulated and the election outcome is correct unless it is audited with a voter-verified paper ballot," she said.
  The recent warnings arising from Russia's attacks spurred Texas' legislature to create a special committee on election security.
  But Dan Wallach, a Rice University computer scientist, said when he told the panel, "We need to retire the old voting machines, and we need to set the standards before (spending) the money," the committee members "looked at each other and said, 'unfunded mandate,'" a reference to federal directives that states must pay for.
  "And then they moved on," he said.
  "The brutal truth is – and Texas is not alone in this -- is that they don't see the urgency," he said. "And it's going to be expensive, so it's not going to happen soon."
  Mina Cook, elections administrator in Hunt County east of Dallas, said the county commissioners court is considering her office's request to approve $1.5 million in new machines for the county's 53,000 registered voters.
  "We have used a combination of paper and electronics since 2005," Cook said. "The electronic that we're using now has been spot on every time." But told about DHS Secretary Nielsen's declaration, she added: "The decision is not final."
  As for San Jacinto County's new machines, Elections Administrator Shelly said, "I hope and pray that if they find that … these machines are going to have a modification in order to be used, I would hope and pray that there could be some change to our existing machines so our county is not out of all that money."
  James Scott, co-founder of the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Protection and an adviser to the U.S. government on voting security, says "certification" tests for electronic machines can't trace malware that deletes itself after tampering with vote totals.