A group called Vote Action is suing California to stop the use of touch screen voting systems citing security and integrity concerns.

The suit, put together by the voting rights group Voter Action, asks a San Francisco Superior Court to nullify February's conditional certification of Diebold Election System's AccuVote-TSx electronic voting system and ban the purchase or use of the system for the November statewide election.

"We can't have trustworthy elections with Diebold's voting machines,'' said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action who is an attorney in the case. "They are insecure and easily hacked."

The suit also names the 18 California counties, including Alameda and Marin, that used any Diebold system in the last election.

From SAN FRANCISCO / Voter group sues to ban touch-screen system
Referenced Wed Mar 22 2006 13:48:02 GMT-0700 (MST)

In Utah, it hasn't gone to the courts--yet. An interesting development, however, was Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk turning over some of his recently delivered machines for testing and analysis. Among other issues, some of the machines weren't even new. Of more concern were safety and security issues that the testing turned up.

While analyzing the memory storage problem, Hursti discovered a critical security hole in the foundation of the touch-screen. Then he found another in the "lobby," and another on the "first floor." Taken together, these present a potentially catastrophic security hole.

These are not programming errors, but architectural design decisions.

From Black Box Voting - Diebold TSx touch-screen study (Part I)
Referenced Wed Mar 22 2006 13:55:05 GMT-0700 (MST)