Year: 2019
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How to do a Risk-Limiting Audit
In the U.S. we use voting machines to count the votes. Most of the time they’re very accurate indeed, but they can make big mistakes if there’s a bug in the software, or if a hacker installs fraudulent vote-counting software, or if there’s a misconfigured ballot-definition file, or if the scanner is miscalibrated. Therefore we…
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Choosing Between Content Moderation Interventions
How can we design remedies for content “violations” online? Speaking today at CITP is Eric Goldman (@ericgoldman), a professor of law and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University School of Law. Before he became a full-time academic in 2002, Eric practiced Internet law for eight years in the Silicon Valley.…
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ImageCast Evolution voting machine: Mitigations, misleadings, and misunderstandings
Two months ago I wrote that the New York State Board of Elections was going to request a reexamination of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine, in light of a design flaw that I had previously described. The Dominion ICE is an optical-scan voting machine. Most voters are expected to feed in a hand-marked optical…
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OpenPrecincts: Can Citizen Science Improve Gerrymandering Reform?
How the American public understand gerrymandering and collect data that could lead to fairer, more representative voting districts across the US? Speaking today at CITP are Ben Williams and Hannah Wheelen of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
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BMDs are not meaningfully auditable
The 2019 article described here was later revised and published in a peer-reviewed journal as, Ballot-Marking Devices Cannot Assure the Will of the Voters, by Andrew W. Appel, Richard A. DeMillo, and Philip B. Stark. Election Law Journal, vol. 19 no. 3, pp. 432-450, September 2020. (Non-paywall version, differs in formatting and pagination). This paper has just…
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CITP’s OpenWPM privacy measurement tool moves to Mozilla
As part of my PhD at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP), I led the development of OpenWPM, a tool for web privacy measurement, with the help of many contributors. My co-authors and I first released OpenWPM in 2014 with the goal of lowering the technical costs of large-scale web privacy measurement. The tool’s…
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The Trust Architecture of Blockchain: Kevin Werbach at CITP
Rather than removing the need for trust, blockchain offers a new architecture of trust, according to Kevin Werbach, today’s speaker at CITP.
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AI Ethics: Seven Traps
By Annette Zimmermann and Bendert Zevenbergen The question of how to ensure that technological innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence leads to ethically desirable—or, more minimally, ethically defensible—impacts on society has generated much public debate in recent years. Most of these discussions have been accompanied by a strong sense of urgency: as more…
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Voting machines I recommend
I’ve written several articles critical of specific voting machines, and you might wonder, are there any voting machines I like? For in-person voting (whether on election day or in early vote centers), I recommend Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines, with a ballot-marking device (BMD) available for those voters unable to mark a ballot by…
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Reexamination of an all-in-one voting machine
The co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections has formally requested that the Election Operations Unit of the State Board re-examine the State’s certification of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine. The Dominion ImageCast Evolution (also called Dominion ICE) is an “all-in-one” voting machine that combines in the same paper path an optical scanner…