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CONTACT: Jeff Grove
Washington, D.C., February 12, 2004 -- ACM's US Public Policy Committee (USACM) has joined 35 other organizations in urging Congress to fully fund initiatives designed to ensure secure electronic voting systems. The initiatives were established under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which created a new federal agency to develop voting systems guidelines that provide for the security of computers, computer data storage, and networks used in voting systems. The new agency, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), is charged with working with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop updated security standards for all voting systems. EAC was designed to address national election issued that need immediate attention. In a letter dated February 9, the coalition urged Congress to sufficiently fund the agency so that it could immediately review security risks of systems such as Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting. Other signers in the coalition include representatives of local and state elections officials, civil rights organizations and election reform advocates. USACM's action in joining the coalition continues its commitment to raise public awareness of security and vulnerability issues resulting from the deployment of electronic voting technologies. USACM expanded the dialogue on electronic voting security beyond the involvement of technologists in July 2003, when it hosted a workshop on the national elections process at the International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers' (IACREOT) Conference. The USACM workshop marked the first time that election officials and voting systems vendors gathered with computer scientists and technologists to debate the vulnerabilities of computerized and electronic voting systems. As this event and other studies have indicated, these vulnerabilities stem from evidence that computers are inherently subject to programming error, equipment malfunction, and malicious tampering. As a result, USACM continues to recommend that a voter-verified audit trail be one of the essential requirements for deploying new voting systems. About ACM The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership by delivering cutting edge technical information and transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM hosts the computing industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature. With its world-class journals and magazines, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops and electronic forums, ACM is a primary resource for the information technology field. For additional information about ACM, visit our web site at www.acm.org. |
