Ted Selker and I wrote a memorandum to our VTP colleague Ron Rivest, requesting that the Technical Guidelines Development Committee’s Subcommitee on Computer Security and Transparency (Ron chairs this subcommitee) consider the development of federal standards for statewide voter registration database. Readers of Election Updates know this is an issue that I’ve been talking about in many different forums recently.

Here is the most relevant section from our short memorandum:

We wanted to draw your attention to an issue that has been a subject of our concern since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002: the lack of federal standards for the Statewide Voter Registration Databases (SVRD) required in most states under Section 303 of HAVA. We request that the TGDC and the TGDC Subcommittee
on Computer Security and Transparency initiate the development of federal standards for these important voting systems.

Our understanding is that the scope of the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) covers standards for “voting systems”, and in our opinion SVRD’s are indeed “voting systems”. We refer you to section 221(e)(2)(A) of HAVA, which states that among the areas the TGDC should develop guidelines includes “the computerized list required under section 303(a).”

Of course if readers want to raise this issue with NIST and the EAC, we welcome the help!