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Voting machine security: Too little too late?
Jan 10, 2020
https://gcn.com/articles/2020/01/10/voting-equipment-security-requirements.aspx

Eddie Perez, global director of technology research and development at the OSET Institute, said in a phone interview that while it's important to get industry on record supporting increased reporting requirements, he's skeptical whether the companies plan to follow through absent federal enforcement.

He argued many of the other proposed changes discussed in the hearing would not meaningfully address the fundamental, systemic problems that plague the industry and inhibit better security practices, namely the consolidation of voting machine production across just three vendors and a plodding system for testing and certifying machines.

"I would have preferred to have heard more questions that press upon the status quo, because the fundamentals of the market today, supported by current policies of the [Election Assistance Commission] and in particular implementation of its certification program, those are big part of the reason why voting infrastructure is suffering," he said.

While many new voting machines have come on the market over the past two decades, virtually all of them were designed to system standards developed by the EAC in 2005. The agency is working on updated standards, but they will almost certainly not be in place this year as states look to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in new federal grant funding to update their voting machines.

Perez said he was worried states would end up simply repeating the mistakes of the past.

"The real danger is that in the absence of any more significant change, Congress and EAC and the vendors are just going to hit the reset button on 10 more years of dysfunction in continuance of the last decade's problems," he said.