PRI beats the e-voting dis-trust drum

Today’s "The World" broadcast of Public Radio International had a couple of nifty quotes I wanted to share:

"The paper trail is not helpful if the software is not doing what what it should."

"For any electronic voting system to be successful, the voters have to trust the voting machines. In the U.S., that trust simply does not exist."

(These are not verbatim, but I hope that the archive soon contain the broadcast; my apologies for inaccuracies.)

My wonder for the day is whether press coverage like this actually deepens mistrust by calling attention to it. In other words the press coverage has a downside as well as the upside of raising awareness of (a) the need for public trust (b) trust is based on assurance of a system "doing what it should."

My repeated-rant for the day is that people rightly point out the need for much more public trust in U.S. e-voting, but AFAICT, it is only OSDV that is defining and implementing the a complete scheme for building an edifice of public trust in IT systems used in elections – including show and tell of real devices that are built to earn trust.

EJS