Marc L. Songini

With this year's New York Senate and Assembly session now ended, local voting activists are chalking up a victory for the public at the expense of Microsoft Corp. and the e-voting industry. The activists had feared that Microsoft and a handful of e-voting device vendors would quietly weaken the state's strict e-voting software escrow law before the current legislative session ended on Friday.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is now looking to alternative technologies for its border security system after RFID tags failed to work as expected in a 15-month test.

A company hired by The New York State Board of Elections has been told to stand down because its testing and certifying of electronic voting machines employed flawed methodology.

Officials in Ohio's Cuyahoga County are mulling the idea of scrapping a US$17 million (C$19.5 million) investment in touch-screen electronic voting systems and switching to optical-scan devices.

Ohio's Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners is considering scrapping a US$17 million investment in touch-screen electronic-voting hardware and switching to precinct count optical scan devices.

The jury is still out on the performance of e-voting systems throughout the country in this week's midterm elections, according to officials and technical experts interviewed during and after the vote.

An electronic system set up last month by the U.S. Department of Defense to help overseas soldiers and other military personnel and contractors cast ballots in U.S. elections lacks security safeguards, critics say.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Saturday vetoed legislation that would have created a security framework for the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology in the state's official documents and identification cards.