Maryland patches its voting system

(I started writing this as a comment on Ben's post... then realized I would be using way too many links!)

Ben Adida (now a postdoc at Harvard) points out ("Fixing Bugs and Breaking Certification") that DESI has developed fixes to address the rampant problems experienced in Maryland counties in their recent election. Ben asks, "Clearly, this fix required an update to the voting machine software. [...] So, what happens to the certification process? Is there really time to re-certify between now and then? Is certification happening at all?"

Well, technically, the poll books broke down, although I did hear of a few cases of the BSOD with machines. Under Maryland election law, the voting system has "examined by an independent testing laboratory that is approved by the National Association of State Election Directors" and "shown by the testing laboratory to meet the performance and test standards for electronic voting systems established by the Federal Election Commission" (§9-102(2)). However, the definition for "voting system" is "a method of casting and tabulating ballots or votes" (§1-101(yy)); that doesn't seem to include the registration/voter authentication process. So, it would seem that changes to the pollbook subsystem are outside of Maryland election law.

(The Maryland legislature had better get hopping to change §9-102(2) to reflect the new sheriffs in town... they should read something like "shown by a voting system testing laboratory (VSTL) that is approved by the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)" and "shown by the testing laboratory to meet the version of the voluntary voting system guidelines in effect at the time of certification as established by the EAC".)

However, Linda Lamone (the director of the Maryland SBoE) has stated publicly, "If I'm not 100 percent sure that this system is 100 percent operational, it will not be used on election day." So, it sounds like there is some state-level testing and IV&V left to be done on the pollbooks.

So, federal certification isn't happening. In fact, it remains to be seen if the pollbook feature is included in the federal certification process at all (I have conflicting evidence and no one has access to the ITA reports). As for the question of regression testing (have other bugs been introduced), we'll probably find that out on November 7.