It's been a while since I've written about electronic voting machines, but Dan Wallach has an
excellent blog post about the current line of argument from the voting machine companies and why it's wrong.
Unsurprisingly, the vendors and their trade organization are spinning the results of these studies, as best they can, in an attempt to downplay their significance. Hopefully, legislators and election administrators are smart enough to grasp the vendors´ behavior for what it actually is and take appropriate steps to bolster our election integrity.
Until then, the bottom line is that many jurisdictions in Texas and elsewhere in the country will be using e-voting equipment this November with known security vulnerabilities, and the procedures and controls they are using will not be sufficient to either prevent or detect sophisticated attacks on their e-voting equipment. While there are procedures with the capability to detect many of these attacks (e.g., post-election auditing of voter-verified paper records), Texas has not certified such equipment for use in the state. Texas´s DREs are simply vulnerable to and undefended against attacks.
