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Category: Other Topics

  • We are releasing three longitudinal datasets of Yelp review recommendations with over 2.5M unique reviews.

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    By Ryan Amos, Roland Maio, and Prateek Mittal Online reviews are an important source of consumer information, play an important role in consumer protection, and have a substantial impact on businesses’ economic outcomes. Some of these reviews may be problematic; for example, incentivized reviews, reviews with a conflict of interest, irrelevant reviews, and entirely fabricated…

  • Is This An Ad? Help Us Identify Misleading Content On YouTube

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    by Michael Swart, Arunesh Mathur, and Marshini Chetty Ever watched a video on YouTube and wondered if the YouTuber was paid for endorsing a product? You are not alone. In fact, Senator Blumenthal of Connecticut recently called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into deceptive practices where YouTubers do not disclose that they…

  • ImageCast Evolution voting machine: Mitigations, misleadings, and misunderstandings

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    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…

  • Voting machines I recommend

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    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…

  • Reexamination of an all-in-one voting machine

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    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…

  • Princeton Students: Learn the Design & Ethics of Large-Scale Experimentation

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    Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences. These experiments are also powerful tools to monitor injustice and govern human and algorithm behavior. How can we do field experiments at scale, reliably,…

  • Pilots of risk-limiting election audits in California and Virginia

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    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…

  • Why voters should mark ballots by hand

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    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…

  • Expert opinions on in-person voting machines and vote-by-mail

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    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…

  • Florida is the Florida of ballot-design mistakes

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    Well designed ballot layouts allow voters to make their intentions clear; badly designed ballots invite voters to make mistakes.  This year, the Florida Senate race may be decided by a misleading ballot layout—a layout that violated the ballot design recommendations of the Election Assistance Commission. In Miami Palm Beach, Florida in the year 2000, the badly…

  • Two cheers for limited democracy in New Jersey

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    When I voted last week in Princeton, New Jersey, here were the choices I faced, all on one “page”: I had to vote in 7 contests, total: for Senator, Congress(wo)man, County board, County board unexpired term, City council, Statewide referendum, School board.  Put another way, I had to select 13 choices out of 27 options…

  • When the optical scanners jam up, what then?

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    In the November 2018 election, many optical-scan voting machines in New York experienced problems with paper jams, caused by the rainy weather and excessive humidity. Also, this was the first time New York used a 2-page ballot that the voter had to separate at the perforations.  This doubled the number of sheets of paper that…