More coverage on GAO report...

Kim and I are quoted in a story today ("Report finds e-vote promise, problems") about the GAO report in the Oakland Tribune by Ian Hoffman.

Man, my first quote makes me sound like a high school girl... the second one is pretty good, though.

Check out the quotes below the fold (or click through to the Trib above):

[More:]

[...] As a result, the new standards for security, performance and accuracy of voting systems have been three years in the making and may not be applied to actual voting systems until 2007. New labs to test voting systems to the standards won't be approved until then, and the existing laboratories may continue testing voting systems to older standards until June 2008.

"It's the first report to come out and say this job isn't happening the way it should be," said Kim Alexander, president of the nonprofit California Voter Foundation. "It lays bare the inadequacies of federal oversight of our voting systems."

The GAO's report also marks the strongest federal statements to date favoring the use of multiple ballot records, such as paper trails, to make sure electronic-voting systems work properly and vote tallies are accurate.

"That's really neat. It's sort of a burden on election administrators, but if you really want to cross your T's, it needs to be done," said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a Berkeley graduate student researching voting technologies as part of ACCURATE, a federally funded project involving several U.S. universities.

Hall wishes federal analysts had seen the need for more transparency in voting-system testing and purchases. At present, testing labs do not share their methods or findings with state and local elections officials, and vendors insist that much information about their machines and software are trade secrets that cannot be revealed to the public.

Still, Hall said, " It's great to see these things on paper and recommended that we take this more seriously, that we do auditing and incident reporting that a lot of us feel should be part of the process anyway."