Author: Andrew Appel
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A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified
A new paper by Henry Herrington, a computer science undergraduate at Princeton University, demonstrates that a hacked PDF ballot can display one set of votes to the voter, but different votes after it’s emailed – or uploaded – to election officials doing the counting. For overseas voters or voters with disabilities, many states provide “Remote Accessible Vote…
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ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby New York Legislature on Risky Voting Machines
The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would ban all-in-one voting machines. That is, voting machines that can both print votes on a ballot and scan and count votes from a ballot – all in the same paper path. This is an important safeguard because such machines, if they are hacked by…
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“Signal Loss” and advertising privacy on Facebook
The 2021 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, a major award administered by a Japanese foundation, goes to Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Chinese computer scientist who earned PhDs from Harvard and the University of Illinois before being a professor at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and then becoming Dean of an important theoretical computer science education program…
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Could quantum computers be cost-effective by 2036?
In theory, quantum computers could be much more efficient at some kinds of tasks, which could be potentially disruptive in applications areas such as cryptography. But you know: in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice, they are not. So it’s interesting to find applications where quantum computing might possibly be useful…
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Another 2020 lawsuit over internet voting
Last week I summarized 4 lawsuits filed in 2020 over internet voting, in VA, NJ, NY, NH. Then I learned there was another in North Carolina. In 2020 the North Carolina Council of the Blind sued the State Board of Elections, demanding that the Board offer “alternative format absentee ballots allowing private and independent method…
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Four 2020 lawsuits over internet voting
Citizens with disabilities (and voters living abroad) must have the substantive right to vote—that’s the law. Sometimes that turns into a demand for internet voting. But as I wrote earlier this year, internet voting is dangerously insecure, it’s not what most voters with disabilities want, and there are much better ways of accommodating voters with disabilities,…
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It’s still practically impossible to secure your computer (or voting machine) against attackers who have 30 minutes of access
It has been understood for decades that it’s practically impossible to secure your computer (or computer-based device such as a voting machine) from attackers who have physical access. The basic principle is that someone with physical access doesn’t have to log in using the password, they can just unscrew your hard drive (or SSD, or…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 2
In my previous post I explained the preliminary conclusions from the three experts engaged by New Hampshire to examine an election anomaly in the town of Windham, November 2020. Improperly folded ballots (which shouldn’t have happened) had folds that were interpreted as votes (which also shouldn’t have happened) and this wasn’t noticed by any routine…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 1
Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of optical-scan voting machines (possibly over several years of use) can cause paper-fold lines in absentee ballots to be interpreted as votes. In a local…
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Accommodating voters with disabilities
Citizens with disabilities have as much right to vote as anyone else, and our election systems should fully accommodate them. In recent years some advocates have claimed that electronic ballot return, in other words internet voting, is needed to accommodate voters with disabilities. But internet voting is dangerously insecure–in the context of U.S. public elections…
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Internet Voting is Still Inherently Insecure
Legislation for voting by internet is pending in Colorado, and other states have been on the verge of permitting ballots to be returned by internet. But voting by internet is too insecure, too hackable, to use in U.S. elections. Every scientific study comes to the same conclusion—the Defense Department’s study group in 2004, the National…
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Juan Gilbert’s Transparent BMD
Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy recently hosted a talk by Professor Juan Gilbert of the University of Florida, in which he demonstrated his interesting new invention and presented results from user studies. What’s the problem with ballot-marking devices? It’s well known that a voting system must use paper ballots to be trustworthy (at least…