The suit, originally filed in 2001, charges that California's former secretary of state and election officials in California's Riverside County deprived citizens of their constitutional rights by deploying touch-screen voting systems that do not provide a paper record of each vote.
... The court's move comes as controversy over the reliability of touch-screen voting systems intensifies in political and computer science circles. Much of the interest stems from the activism of a coalition of computer scientists who have warned that touch-screen systems currently in use are vulnerable to a wide range of security breaches.
Members of VerifiedVoting.org, led by David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University, advocate computerized voting systems that provide a printed record. With a printed record, they say, voters can check to make sure their vote is accurately recorded. In the event of a recount, the paper printouts also could count as the official ballot.
While California's former secretary of state, Bill Jones, is listed as lead defendant in the Weber case, the state's current secretary, Kevin Shelley, openly has considered the pros and cons of paper printouts. Earlier this year, Shelley convened a task force to study security issues tied to touch-screen voting systems.
But in a report released a month ago, the task force said there was no consensus among members as to whether machines deployed in California should be required to produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot. <more>
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