Category: Other Topics
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Security Seals on AVC Advantage Voting Machines are Easily Defeated
On September 2, 2008, I submitted a report to the New Jersey Superior Court, demonstrating that the DRE voting machines used in New Jersey are insecure: it is easy to replace the vote-counting program with one that fraudulently shifts votes from one candidate to another. In Section 10 of my report, I explained that There…
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Voting Machines are Silent in Princeton Today
In my recent report on the Sequoia AVC Advantage DRE voting machine, I explained (in Section 32) that the AVC Advantage makes a chirping sound when the pollworker activates the machine to accept a vote, and makes the sound again when the voter presses the CAST VOTE button. In important purpose of this sound is…
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Judge Suppresses Report on Voting Machine Security
A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of…
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Lenz Ruling Raises Epistemological Questions
Stephanie Lenz’s case will be familiar to many of you: After publishing a 29-second video on YouTube that shows her toddler dancing to the Prince song “Let’s Go Crazy,” Ms. Lenz received email from YouTube, informing her that the video was being taken down at Universal Music’s request. She filed a DMCA counter-notification claiming the…
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NJ Election Day: Voting Machine Status
Today is primary election day in New Jersey, for all races except U.S. President. (The presidential primary was Feb. 5.) Here’s a roundup of the voting-machine-related issues. First, Union County found that Sequoia voting machines had difficulty reporting results for a candidate named Carlos Cedeño, reportedly because it couldn’t handle the n-with-tilde character in his…
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NJ Voting Machine Tape Shows Phantom Obama Vote
I’ve written before (1, 2, 3) about discrepancies in the election results from New Jersey’s February 5 presidential primary. Yesterday we received yet another set of voting machine result tapes. They show a new kind of discrepancy which we haven’t seen before – and which contradicts the story told by Sequoia (the vendor) and the…
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Shamos on paper trails
In an interview today with CNet, Michael Shamos talks about paper trails. Shamos is a professor at CMU who has served as a voting system analyst for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State. In this article, a transcript of an interview conducted by Declan McCullagh, he spends a fair bit of time trashing paper trails, and…
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Interesting Email from Sequoia
A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to have read it already, I might as well publish it here. Yes, it is genuine. ==== Sender: Smith, Ed [address redacted]@sequoiavote.com To: felten@cs.princeton.edu, appel@princeton.edu Subject:…
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pesky details with getting a voting system correct
Today was the last day of early voting in Texas’s primary election. Historically, I have never voted in a primary election. I’ve never felt I identified enough with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates. Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed…
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Unattended Voting Machines, As Usual
It’s election day, so tradition dictates that I publish some photos of myself with unattended voting machines. To recap: It’s well known that paperless electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering, if an attacker can get physical access to a machine before the election. Most of the vendors, and a few election officials, claim that…