A letter from Connecticut's TrueVoteCT.org member Michael Fischer, published here with permission.

The DRE train wreck has been averted, thanks to everyone's help over the past almost two years. In a press conference Friday, the Secretary of the State (SOTS) announced the voting technology that Connecticut will acquire to meet the requirements of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

For the lever machine replacement, the state will be buying Diebold AccuVote-OS optical scan machines from LHS Associates of Massachusetts. Towns may buy these machines for the November 2006 election and must have them in place by November 2007. Total cost for the state is $15.7M. For the accessibility requirements, the state will buy the IVS "Inspire" vote-by-phone system, configured to print the ballot at the polling place via FAX, and have it in place in all polling places by November 2006. This is a centralized system which is accessed via public dial-up phone lines and actuated by the push buttons of an ordinary touch-tone telephone. This is a one-year contract with an initial cost of about $1M. I believe the SOTS mentioned that there will still be about $15M left in escrow for future use.

In addition, the State has entered into an agreement with the Computer Science and Engineering department of UConn to "assist in certification and acceptance testing of the new voting technology". The evaluation team will be headed by Alex Shvartsman and includes several other faculty members and graduate students with expertise in cryptography, computer security, and software systems. They apparently already played a significant role in convincing [SOTS] Bysiewicz that "Touch-screen technology, in its current state of development, is simply not ready for 'prime time' here in Connecticut." She also thanked TrueVoteCT specifically and Bill and me in particular (who were the only TVCT people present) for providing input that led to this decision.

I think we have to take this as essentially a complete victory. We were afraid of paperless DRE machines and got SB55 passed. Even with voter-verified paper trails, we were afraid of DRE machines because of their initial and ongoing costs, complexity, unreliability, and security difficulties. We advocated optical scan machines as the best available technology and got it. We were concerned that the SOTS had no technical expertise in her office with which to evaluate, test, and certify voting technology. With the UConn partnership, she now has such expertise from a group that is independent of both vendors and government. We initially found communication with the SOTS office strained and difficult at best. We now have a productive open working relationship through the Deputy SOTS, Lesley Mara.

The area in which we could have hoped for more is in the machines for the disabled. We advocated a unified optical scan system in which able voters would mark paper ballots with a pen and disabled voters would mark paper ballots with a ballot marking device, but all ballots would be counted in the same way. That didn't come to pass, but even there, the limitation of the IVS contract to one year leaves open the door to purchase compatible ballot marking devices should Diebold (or another vendor) make them available in the future.

Of course our work is not done. We need to monitor the security problems with the Diebold scanners and the short- and long-term mitigations that are required for their safe use. We need to be sure that adequate pre-election testing procedures are developed and followed and that everyone understands their importance. We need to push for legislation to require mandatory random audits for all voting systems.* We need to continue to monitor new developments in voting technology and standards and advise the State on their use. Finally, we need to push for legislation to revive the Voting Technology Standards Board as the official public body in which groups interested in voting technology can come together to offer their views, exchange information, and provide advice.

We've come a long way in a short time. Concerned citizens do make a difference!
Best regards,
--Mike