Grant Gross
Senior Writer

NJ residents plan lawsuit to block e-voting

news
Oct 19, 20042 mins

State's Attorney General defends voting machines

Threatened with a lawsuit to block the use of electronic voting machines, New Jersey’s Office of the Attorney General is defending them as secure.

Penny Venetis, a professor with the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers University, plans to file the lawsuit on behalf of several New Jersey residents as early as Tuesday, according to a Clinic spokeswoman. The lawsuit will allege that e-voting machines used in New Jersey aren’t secure because they do not include a voter verified paper trail.

Venetis was not immediately available for comment, and more details about the lawsuit weren’t available.

Fifteen of New Jersey’s 21 counties plan to use direct electronic recording machines (DREs) in the Nov. 2 election, according to Lee Moore, a spokesman for the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. New Jersey plans to use four models of e-voting machines.

The attorney general’s office won’t comment on the specific lawsuit, Moore said, but he defended New Jersey’s DREs. “It’s not prudent to pilot new technology in this election,” he said of voter verified printed ballots.

The state is open to new technologies in the future, but it’s too late to change the voting system for this election, Moore added.

“The counties, by and large, share our confidence … in the voting technology we have in place now,” he said. “Essentially, what we have been saying all along is that New Jersey elections have been historically problem-free.”

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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