Author: Andrew Appel
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Ballot-level comparison audits: precinct-count
Special bonus: This article contains two puzzles for the reader, marked in green. Try to solve them yourself before reading the solutions in a future post! In my last post I described a particularly efficient kind of risk-limiting audit (RLA) of election results: ballot-level comparison audits, which rely on a unique serial number on every…
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Ballot-level comparison audits: central-count
All voting machines these days are computers, and any voting machine that is a computer can be hacked to cheat. The widely accepted solution is to use voting machines to count paper ballots, and do Risk-Limiting Audits: random-sample inspections of those paper ballots to ensure (with a guaranteed level of assurance) that the election outcome…
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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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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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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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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…
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Pilots of risk-limiting election audits in California and Virginia
In order to run trustworthy elections using hackable computers (including hackable voting machines), “elections should be conducted with human-readable paper ballots. … States should mandate risk-limiting audits prior to the certification of election results.” What is a risk-limiting audit, and how do you perform one? An RLA is a human inspection of a random sample of…
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Why voters should mark ballots by hand
Because voting machines contain computers that can be hacked to make them cheat, “Elections should be conducted with human-readable paper ballots. These may be marked by hand or by machine (using a ballot-marking device); they may be counted by hand or by machine (using an optical scanner). Recounts and audits should be conducted by human inspection…
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Expert opinions on in-person voting machines and vote-by-mail
In November 2018 I got opinions on voting machines and vote-by-mail from 17 experts on election verification, who have experience running/observing/studying elections in 17 states. On the acceptability of these in-the-polling-place voting technologies, in the context of U.S. elections: The consensus is that Direct Recording Electronic voting machines are unacceptable, even with a VVPAT (“voter verified paper audit…