Author: Andrew Appel

Why did New Jersey counties keep choosing one insecure voting machine after another, for decades?  Only this year did I realize what the reason might be. A century ago, New Jersey (like many other states) adopted lever voting machines that listed the offices by row, with the parties (and their candidates) across the columns: The…

Paper ballots should not have barcodes to mark votes; paper ballots should have barcodes to mark ballot styles.  Why is that?  What’s the difference?  And at the end, I describe a useful innovation from a company called Voting.works.   One of the most important reasons we use paper ballots in elections is to protect our elections…

This letter, signed by more than 20 election cybersecurity experts, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State Senate Committee on Government in response to a request for policy advice, but it applies in any state — especially those that use Ballot Marking Devices for all in-person voters: Georgia and South Carolina; most counties in Arkansas, New…

Last year, I published a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system.  Like any internet voting system, it has inherent security vulnerabilities: if there are malicious insiders, they can corrupt the vote count; and if thousands of voters’ computers are hacked by malware, the malware can change votes as they are transmitted.   Switzerland “solves” the…

To run vote centers that must supply many different ballot styles, for hand-markable paper ballots to be counted by optical scanners, it’s convenient and effective to use ballot-on-demand (BOD) printers.  When the voter signs in at the vote center, the BOD laser printer produces a hand-markable optical scan ballot, with the appropriate choice of contests…

Almost all Arkansas counties have been using ballot-marking devices (BMDs) in their elections. Searcy County has just chosen to switch to hand-marked (fill-in-the-oval) paper ballots, which will be counted by machine (for an unofficial, immediate count) and then counted by hand (for an official, certified count). Hand counting all the ballots might be impractical in…

Statement by Computer Security Experts,  May 12, 2023 The report on security flaws in Dominion voting machines, written by Professors J. Alex Halderman and Drew Springall in July 2021 and placed under seal by the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, should be immediately unsealed by the Court and be made public. …

Part 4 of a 4-part series When the voter marks 2 votes in a vote-for-1 contest, or 5 votes in a vote-for-4 contest (etc.), that’s called an overvote. The Los Angeles VSAP optical-scan voting machines are so eager to treat a mark as a vote, that they treat stray marks of the kind illustrated here…

Part 3 of a 4-part series In a recent article I wrote about the recount of a very close tax-rate referendum in the city of Long Beach, California.  The referendum passed by 16 votes out of 100,000 ballots; the opponents of the measure requested a recount, as they are entitled to do by California law—provided…

Part 2 of a 4-part series My previous article explained why it’s a bad practice, used in some election offices, to open absentee ballot envelopes before sorting them by precinct (or ballot-style).  Those jurisdictions rely on the ballot-style barcode, printed on the optical-scan ballot, that tells the Central Count Optical Scan (CCOS) voting machine what’s…