In recent closed meetings the government’s Election Assistance Commission (EAC) eliminated the requirement that banned voting machines from connecting to the Internet.
The AP reported (emphasis added):
Key elements of the first federal technology standards for voting equipment in 15 years should be scrapped because language that would have banned the devices from connecting to the internet was dropped after private meetings held with manufacturers, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The lawsuit against the U.S. Election Assistance Commission [EAC], filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., claims those meetings should have been open and that changes to the draft standards should have been shared with the commission’s advisory and standards boards. The lawsuit seeks to have those changes set aside.
The standards, approved in February, did not include draft language that would have banned wireless technology from voting equipment under federal certification guidelines. Voting security experts say the machines will be vulnerable to hacking without such a ban.
While the commission’s certification guidelines are voluntary, multiple states use them to set mandatory requirements for voting equipment.
We’ve written about the EAC before. This entity certified their only two election auditors within four hours after we reported that these firms were not certified.
We also reported that one of the leaders at the EAC previously worked with Dominion Voting Systems.
So is it really surprising that the EAC would quietly remove their requirement that voting machines cannot be connected to the Internet?
Source: TGP
