Wired News have a solid piece on the problems with standardising e-voting once the systems are already in the wild. In fact the article makes a good postscript to the paper I've written on standardisation in e-voting which is due out 'any time now' in Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society.
The IEEE committee the Wired News article discusses is suffering from the same problems the IVTA and OASIS committees before it have had… the appearance of vendor control. Sometimes we don't care if a standard, such as Firewire, is being pushed by vendors. But for something like voting there's a very broad range of stakeholders that need to be engaged. One hopes that an institution like IEEE has strong measures in place to ensure that significant consultation is undertaken. But in fact it took concerted work by the EFF to help set the IEEE on the straight and narrow.
Jason Kitcat 