History of the Voting System Standards Program

(as of November 1998) 

During the 1970’s, nearly anyone could cobble together a 

"voting machine", and sell it to local election officials. Few 

States had any guidelines for testing or evaluating these 

devices. Local officials either had to take the salesman’s 

word that the system worked or else depend on the opinion 

of colleagues who had already bought it. Voting equipment 

horror stories -- some of them funny, some of them 

downright chilling -- soon began circulating through the 

election community. They triggered concerns about the 

integrity of the voting process.

In February 1975, the General Accounting Office’s Office 

of Federal Elections (predecessor to the Federal Election 

Commission) signed an interagency agreement with the 

National Bureau of Standards to develop operational 

guidelines that election administrators could use to help 

ensure the accuracy and security of the computer-based 

vote-tallying process. The resulting March 1975 report, 

Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote-Tallying, 

concluded that one of the basic causes for computer-related 

election problems was the lack of appropriate technical 

skills at the State and local level for developing or 

implementing written standards, against which voting 

system hardware and software could be evaluated.

This report and comments from State and local election 

officials led the U.S. Congress to direct the Federal 

Election Commission (FEC), in conjunction with the 

National Bureau of Standards (now known as the National 

Institute of Standards and Technology), to conduct a study 

on the feasibility of developing voluntary engineering and 

procedural performance standards for voting systems used 

in the United States. In early 1984, this three-year effort 

produced Voting System Standards: A Report on the 

Feasibility of Developing Voluntary Standards for Voting 

Equipment.

Based on the recommendations in that report, Congress 

appropriated funds permitting the Commission to begin 

developing voluntary national standards for computerbased voting systems. The FEC began the process in July 

1984, and completed it with the Commission’s approval in 

January 1990 of the first national performance and test 

standards for punchcard, marksense, and direct recording 
electronic voting systems. More than 130 State and local 

election officials, independent technical experts, vendors, 

Congressional staff, and others participated in the effort to 

produce this document. The FEC spent $285,000 on four 

contracts over the course of this effort.

 

Over an extended period of time after the publication of 

these standards, the National Association of State Election 

Directors (NASED) established a process by which vendors 

could submit their equipment to independent test 

authorities for evaluation against the national standards. 

Wyle Laboratories and Nichols Research Corporation are 

currently certified by NASED to test hardware and examine 

software. To date, seven vendors have submitted twelve 

full voting system models or system components to these 

test authorities for qualification testing. The resulting test 

reports can be used by States and local jurisdictions as a 

foundation for assessing system integrity, accuracy, and 

reliability. 

This national testing effort is overseen by NASED’s Voting 

System Committee, which is composed of election 

officials, independent technical advisors, and the FEC’s 

former contractor for the standards project. The FEC’s 

Director of the Office of Election Administration and 

representatives of Wyle and Nichols are ex-officio 

members. The Executive Director of the Election Center, a 

non-governmental entity with member State and local 

election officials and election product vendors, serves as 

Secretariat to the committee.

As the qualification testing process evolved and tested 

systems were used in the field, NASED’s Voting Systems 

Committee identified standards and testing issues that 

needed to be resolved. In February of 1997, Christopher 

Thomas, then President of NASED, and Thomas Wilkey, 

Chairman of NASED’s Voting Systems Committee, briefed 

Commissioners on the need for continuing FEC 

involvement to address standards and testing issues raised 

by the independent test authorities, as well as to keep the 

national standards up-to-date. The current voting system 

standards do not, for example, address system components 

and configurations that relate to telecommunications, offthe-shelf hardware, newer practices in software design, or 

developments to assist the visually impaired in voting.
Subsequently, the Commission agreed both to continued 

participation in the standards program, pending the 

outcome of an alternatives analysis to asses the fiscal 

impact of making needed changes to the national standards, 

and to a contract for the alternatives analysis. The selected 

contractor, ManTech Advanced Systems International, 

presented an initial draft of the alternatives analysis at a 

meeting of the FEC Advisory Panel in April 1998. The 

panel, composed of twenty State and local election officials 

from around the country, used the opportunity to review 

and comment on the initial draft. After this meeting, the 

contractor proceeded to prepare the final report to the 

Commission.