Author: Andrew Appel
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Organizing and Automating Poll Tape Auditing
(Part 3 of a 3-part series) In previous articles in this series, I’ve explained that any member of the public can witness the poll tapes printed by voting machines when the polls close—in at least 30 states. Other states have more restrictive rules. To make this practice effective, we need these three things: The good…
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Compare the Poll Tapes Against the Precinct-by-Precinct Election Results
(part 2 of a 3-part series) In most states, the county election administrator publishes election results with vote totals for each candidate broken down by precinct. Here’s an example from Mercer County, New Jersey, from the 2024 General Election (click on Detail XLS, Detail XML, or Detail TXT to get the spreadsheet in one format…
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Publish the Poll Tapes
(Part 1 of a 3-part series) If we are worried that hacked (or unintentionally misconfigured) voting systems might incorrectly count the ballots, there are three parts to the voting system that we should worry about: If the voting machines are hacked, or misconfigured, then the results they write onto the thumbdrives and the poll tapes…
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New Voting Machine Purchases Should Be VVSG 2.0 Certified
Summary: All the voting machines that counties and states bought before 2025 complied with standards (e.g., VVSG 1.0 or 1.1) that were extremely weak on cybersecurity, and indeed most of those voting systems were easy to hack (make them cheat in elections) and their back-end databases were easy to alter (to change vote totals). Now…
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Ballot tabulation by uploading scanned images for OCR is quite insecure
The Georgia legislature recently passed a law banning QR-code ballots in vote tabulation, which is a step in the right direction. But the Georgia Secretary of State’s response is a plan to continue using QR-code ballots, to “tabulate” or “verify” the election results based on uploading the digital ballot images for optical-character recognition. This plan is insecure…
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Georgia still using tragicomically insecure voting system
Don’t leave your car key in the glove compartment. And don’t key all the vehicles in your fleet with the same key, and leave that key in every glove compartment. For over a decade 2004-2018, Georgia was using voting machines so insecure it was like having a fleet of vehicles that didn’t even use keys…
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Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections
Signed by a group of 21 computer scientists expert in election security Executive summary Scientists have understood for many years that internet voting is insecure and that there is no known or foreseeable technology that can make it secure. Still, vendors of internet voting keep claiming that, somehow, their new system is different, or the insecurity…
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Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps
Bradley Tusk has been pushing the concept of “vote by phone.” Most recently his “Mobile Voting Foundation” put out a press release touting something called “VoteSecure”, claiming that “secure and verifiable mobile voting is within reach.” Based on my analysis of VoteSecure, I can say that secure and verifiable mobile voting is NOT within reach. It’s…
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Reports on the Hart Verity Vanguard Voting Machines
Most U.S. election jurisdictions (states, counties, cities, or other subjurisdictions) use voting machines to tally votes, and in some cases also to mark votes on paper. In most U.S. states, before a jurisdiction within the state can adopt the use of a particular voting machine, the Secretary of State appoints a committee to examine the…
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Paper fingerprinting and ballot tracking
In part 1 of this 2-part series I explained: Some election-integrity advocates have suggested that, in addition to good chain-of-custody procedures for ballots between when they’re cast and when they’re counted (or recounted), we should have better control over what paper (and paper ballots) go into the polling place. This way, if fraudulent ballots got…