IDG News Service — An order this week from a New Jersey judge has electronic voting critics and e-voting machine maker Sequoia Voting Systems both claiming some level of victory in a six-year-old lawsuit seeking to decommission the machines.

Mercer County Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg issued an opinion Monday finding Sequoia's paperless, direct record electronic (DRE) voting machines to be safe and reliable absent any "premeditated criminal activity." But Feinberg also ordered that the state's 11,000 voting machines be re-evaluated by a panel of computer experts, with the panel determining whether the state should continue using them.

Sequoia praised the judge's ruling. The decision "affirms what Sequoia and our customers throughout New Jersey and the United States have long known and experienced -- that our voting equipment is indeed safe, accurate and reliable," Jack Blaine, the company's CEO, said in a statement.

While critics of e-voting machines praised Feinberg for ordering the re-evaluation, some of the judge's determinations in the ruling left them baffled. Feinberg, in the 191-page ruling, seemed to reject the need for paper backups as a way to recount votes recorded on e-voting machines.

"There is simply no evidence to conclude that absent complete access, coupled with malicious intent to alter the results of an election, the voting machines have failed to correctly and accurately count every vote cast," Feinberg wrote. "The court rejects the notion that the AVC (Advantage from Sequoia Voting Systems) is not reliable because it cannot be secured from tampering."

Without paper backups, there's no way to know, countered Pamela Smith, president of VerifiedVoting.org, a group pushing for changes to e-voting machines. "That's kind of a stunning statement," she said. "My sense was that she has a lot of faith that the state would sort of do the right things ... but I felt like there were some things that she didn't understand."

The lawsuit was filed in 2004 by the Rutgers School of Law-Newark on behalf of a group of voting rights advocates, including the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action. The groups had sought a restraining order against the use of DREs in the state.

Feinberg discounted testimony describing Sequoia machine hacks by university researchers, instead saying there's no evidence of a Sequoia machine being compromised during an election since the first machines went into operation in 1979.

"Not one witness presented evidence that the AVC, outside of a controlled academic setting, has ever been hacked," she wrote. "There is no evidence of tampering of an AVC (Advantage) in any election in this state, or any impermissible alteration of any vote. Instead, the record is replete with testimony from state and county election officials that, over the many years of use, not one election result in the state has been adversely affected."

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