WASHINGTON - October 28 -  

DAN WALLACH
Wallach is an associate professor at Rice University and also the associate director of the National Science Foundation's ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections), a $7.5 million research effort across six different institutions to improve U.S. election systems. He said today: "Present-day electronic voting systems have a variety of security flaws, many of which you have heard about. Of course, we can find problems with any voting system, but the present-day electronic systems enable fraud of a scale and simplicity previously unknown in the administration of elections."

Wallach added: "Our work [reviewing electronic voting systems in California] found a wide variety of flaws, most notably the possibility of 'viral' attacks, where a single corrupted voting machine could spread that corruption, as part of regular processes and procedures, to every other voting system. In effect, one attacker, corrupting one machine, could arrange for every voting system in the county to be corrupt in the subsequent election."
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PAMELA SMITH
Smith is president of the Verified Voting Foundation and its sister advocacy organization VerifiedVoting.org. She said today: "Voters should be able to check that their votes were recorded accurately; election officials should be able to prove that votes were counted correctly. Post-election audits of voter-verified paper ballots are the best way to make sure voting systems are working as they should -- a potent safeguard on our election process."