Clerks weigh nuclear options

Sources close to one metro area county clerk in Colorado says that they’ll either follow Mesa County’s lead in running their own elections with their own machines without SoS approval or decide to throw the whole mess in Secretary of State Mike Coffman’s lap to fix on his own. And it’s likely that if the second of the two happen, it will be a coordinated action by three or more counties in Colorado says a second source.

“We can’t fix this when the target keeps moving,” said one source, “so we’ll either fix the target ourselves or we’ll tell Mike [Coffman]: here it is, you fix it.”

At issue for the clerks is the process by which Coffman recently decertified thousands of electronic voting machines in Colorado because of security and accuracy concerns.

As new electronic voting machines have come online around the country it has made the work of the clerks easier, yet raised a number of questions about the integrity of electronic voting that have yet to be addressed.

The lack of standards for construction of electronic voting machines is to blame say some.

"There's no validation of how the software for these systems is designed and built," said Seth Hallem CEO of Coverity, a company that makes source code for voting machines, in an article in Scientific American,  adding that this is "surprising given the importance of voting machines to our national infrastructure."  

Other states such as California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut have also expressed either reservations or downright hostility towards e-voting.

Others have been more circumspect: “Electronic voting is generally pretty secure and accurate,” said one computer security expert in DC, “it’s just new so very few people really understand it. In some cases, there is legitimate concern, in other cases it just politics.”

Just politics?

Voting?

Huh. Imagine that.