E-voting test labs get initial nod

Two Colorado-based laboratories this week became the first companies to receive the initial go-ahead in their quest for federal approval to test electronic voting machines used by American voters.

In a letter (PDF) on Thursday, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommended that iBeta Quality Assurance of Aurora, Colo. and SysTest Labs of Denver be granted final clearance to test the systems.

NIST said it reached that decision after completing a "comprehensive technical evaluation" of the laboratories' processes based on the international standard ISO/IEC 17025, which covers "general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories." Copies of documents detailing those efforts are available at its Web site.

Now the process is in the hands of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency that has sole authority to grant full accreditation to the labs. (It had already granted "interim" accreditation to SysTest while it gave NIST time to complete its work.) In a press release, EAC said it plans to undertake additional reviews focused on "non-technical issues such as conflict of interest policies, organizational structure, and record-keeping protocols."

EAC and NIST are required to collaborate on accrediting the test labs under a 2002 federal law called the Help America Vote Act. Called HAVA for short, it dictated a national shift to electronic voting machines in the wake of the hanging chad debacle of the 2000 elections.

The federal law leaves it up to states whether to pay attention to the EAC accreditations, but many are expected to require that their equipment be tested by those companies. Before HAVA, test labs were certified by the National Association of State Election Directors, and 39 states required their machines to have undergone testing by labs accredited by that group.

The announcement of the first two labs to get NIST's nod comes just two weeks after a New York Times report that raised concerns about controls on voting machine test laboratories. Last summer, the EAC temporarily barred another Colorado-based test lab called Ciber Inc. from testing voting machines amidst irregularities in its procedures. The federal agency was criticized for not making that information public sooner.

Ciber is one of four other companies that has also applied for accreditation since the new federal procedures launched in 2005. According to NIST, the full review process takes 9 to 18 months. NIST is also devising uniform, non-proprietary tests for labs to use in conjunction with new voting machine standards, which are expected to be finalized in the next few years.