Federal court upholds Calif. e-voting ban
The decision could have a nationwide impact

News Story by Dan Verton

JULY 07, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A federal judge today upheld California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's April 30 directive that decertified touch-screen voting machines and withheld future certification until vendors of those systems could meet specific security requirements, including voter-verifiable paper audit trails (VVPAT).

The decision arose from a lawsuit, Benavidez v. Shelley, brought by disability rights advocates and four California counties Riverside, San Bernardino, Kern and Plumas that oppose Shelley's VVPAT requirement and decertification orders for direct-recording equipment (DRE) voting systems.

The plaintiffs argued that banning the systems would disenfranchise visually or physically impaired voters.

In an order issued today by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California (download PDF), Judge Florence-Marie Cooper wrote that "the evidence does not support the conclusion that the elimination of the DREs would have a discriminatory effect on the visually or manually impaired."

Cooper also said that the secretary of state's "decision to suspend the use of DREs pending improvement in their reliability is certainly a rational one, designed to protect the voting rights of the state's citizens." Cooper also characterized Shelley's paper audit trail requirement as consistent with his obligation to ensure the accuracy of election votes.

Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the court's decision a "landmark" ruling.

"The court said in clear, unambiguous terms that requiring a paper trail for e-voting machines is consistent with the obligation to assure the accuracy of election results," Cohn said. "That's an enormous victory for secure elections."

"This is great news for voters in California and for the rest of the country," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation.

Specifically, the judge's ruling with regard to the Americans With Disabilities Act "has national ramifications" for e-voting, said Alexander. "This landmark ruling, which takes into account California laws as well as federal laws such as the ADA and the Help America Vote Act of 2002, will have a reverberating impact on states across the country."

The decision comes at a time when state and local elections officials are scrambling to ensure that e-voting systems in different states are reliable, accurate and can be secured from tampering in time for the November election.

Two weeks ago, the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights released a report by an IT security panel that outlined a strategy for certifying the security and reliability of touch-screen DRE voting systems (see story). The systems will be used in jurisdictions representing about 30% of registered voters in the upcoming presidential election.

And in testimony before the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in May, security researchers said that without paper audit trails, the 50 million Americans who will use electronic voting machines this fall will have no way of knowing whether their votes were recorded properly. The security researchers also testified that the code base powering the systems is so complex that election officials can't be sure it's free of malicious code designed to manipulate election results (see story).