Judge orders more testing of vote machines

By Meir Rinde, NJ.com

A judge ordered a panel of experts to evaluate the security of New Jersey’s 11,000 voting machines Monday but stopped short of decommissioning the Sequioa Voting Systems devices or requiring them to be retrofitted to produce a paper trail.

Ruling in a five-and-a-half-year-old case, Mercer County Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg ordered the creation of a new panel of computer security experts to re-evaluate the machines within 120 days to determine whether they comply with a law requiring that they be accurate and reliable, plaintiffs said Monday.

But the Mercer County residents who sued the state, claiming the touch-screen machines were vulnerable to tampering that could allow vote fraud, said Feinberg’s decision did not go far enough.

“I am disappointed the court did not take the step of mandating a voter-verified paper trail or scrapping the electronic machines altogether,” said Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-Princeton Borough, who is one of the plaintiffs. “However, the court did acknowledge glaring deficiencies with the electronic machines which need to be addressed.”

Gusciora said he would urge Gov. Chris Christie and Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who serves as secretary of state, “to carry out the court’s instructions to the fullest.”
Rep. Rush Holt, D-Hopewell Township, criticized the ruling for allowing “faith-based” voting to continue and said he had introduced legislation in Congress requiring paper ballot voting and random audits of vote tallies.

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