MI and the elections

A take on the IT side for the August 7th primary...

The state of Michigan appears to actually place value on voter information, as for it too be used in Electronic Polling Books or EPB, requirea the data to be encrypted with a password of letters and numbers, both cases, and at least 8 characters long. This data is then to be stored on an encrypted portion of a USB flash drive. 

Except of course, they apparently don't mandate that those passwords not be written down on a post-it and adhered to the palm rest of the laptop(s) used.

My only gripe is that there is no whole drive encryption on the laptop used for EPB. That, and the State's tech support is terrible. I've worked out of contract with a local gov't entity from 9pm to past 130am to ensure everything is all setup. The instructions, are based on USB drive encryption by Verbatim, VSafe, which doesn't appear to be transferable to new drives, which use EZ-Lock. It would be better to not use a vendor solution, but switch to something open source, ala Truecrypt. That way, it could also be used to secure the laptop all this info is entered into as well as the USB drives.

Sure it would be too much work for the State though to get that done and adjust their documentation on it.