From Ars Technica
Texas Supreme Court: no e-voting paper trail required
By Timothy B. Lee
A group of Texas voters seeking to stop the use of paperless electronic voting machines reached a dead end on Friday; the Texas Supreme Court ruled that their suits could not proceed without evidence that they have been personally harmed.
Texas has been using direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines for more than a decade. In 2006, a coalition of voters led by the Austin NAACP sued to stop Travis County from using the eSlate, a DRE machine made by Austin-based Hart InterCivic. (Hart does offer a printer as an optional component of its system.) The voters claimed the machines were insecure and did not allow meaningful recounts....
That bothers Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a University of California-Berkeley [School of Information] e-voting scholar, who pointed out that the Travis County machines lack a voter-verified paper trail. That means they "don't keep the type of evidence you'd need to prove these types of harms." So if a DRE machine did alter the outcome of an election, there might be no way to prove it after the fact....
Activists concerned that DRE machines threaten the integrity of elections will have to make their concerns felt through the electoral process. Perhaps the most successful example of this occurred in California. After the courts rebuffed efforts to challenge the use of DREs through litigation, California voters elected Debra Bowen as Secretary of State in 2006. The next year, she conducted a comprehensive review of voting machine security with the help of Wallach, Hall, and numerous other voting and computer security experts. The results caused her to decertify a number of machines, including the eSlate, until the vendor fixed the flaws the researchers discovered....
Joe Hall completed his Ph.D. at the School of Information in 2008 and is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the I School and Princeton University.