US:Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout much of the US "cannot be made secure", according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the US Election Assistance Commission.
The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), one of the government's foremost research centres, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.
In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine's software. The recommendations endorse "optical-scan" systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and election officials save for recounts.
NIST says in its report that the lack of a paper trail for each vote "is one of the main reasons behind continued questions about voting system security and diminished public confidence in elections". The report repeats the contention of the computer security community that "a single programmer could 'rig' a major election."
Fears about rigging have animated critics for years, but there has been no conclusive evidence that such fraud has occurred. Electronic voting systems have had technical problems - including unpredictable screen freezes - leaving voters wondering whether their ballots were properly recorded.
NIST says that voting systems should not rely on a machine's software to provide a record of the votes cast. Some electronic voting system manufacturers have introduced models that include printers to produce a separate record of each vote - and that can be verified by a voter before leaving the machine - but such paper trails have had their own problems.
Printers have jammed or otherwise failed, causing some election directors to question whether a paper trail is an improvement. Maryland state elections administrator Linda Lamone, in an undated video snippet that her critics have circulated on the internet, says voter verification is unnecessary.
"I'm not going to put this paper on my machines - it'll be over my dead body, because I just don't think it works. It really is a false sense of security."