California's elections chief is proposing the toughest standards for voting systems in the country, so tough that they could banish ATM-like touch-screen voting machines from the state.
Two other standards require voting machines to be "effectively" or "reasonably secured against untraceable vote tampering" and cruder "denial of service" attacks intended to make a machine inoperable on Election Day.
For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with "red teams" of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes.
"An army of computer scientists will come forward to testify that computer programs cannot be verified to be secure against 'undetectable vote tampering' and therefore they all will have to be decertified."
Great news. California is the right place for an initiative to solve the voting machine problem. Silicon Valley should be able to come up with a solution to this.
