Category: Other Topics
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Internet Voting
(or, how I learned to stop worrying and love having the whole world know exactly how I voted) Tomorrow is “Super Tuesday” in the United States. Roughly half of the delegates to the Democratic and Republican conventions will be decided tomorrow, and the votes will be cast either in a polling place or through the…
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New York Times Magazine on e-voting
This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has an article by Clive Thompson on electronic voting machines. Freedom to Tinker’s Ed Felten is briefly quoted, as are a small handful of other experts. The article is a reasonable summary of where we are today, with paperless electronic voting systems on a downswing and optical scan paper…
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Ohio Study: Scariest E-Voting Security Report Yet
The State of Ohio released the report of a team of computer scientists it commissioned to study the state’s e-voting systems. Though it’s a stiff competition, this may qualify as the scariest e-voting study report yet. This was the most detailed study yet of the ES&S iVotronic system, and it confirmss the results of the…
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Latest voting system analysis from California
This summer, the California Secretary of State commissioned a first-ever “Top to Bottom Review” of all the electronic voting systems used in the state. In August, the results of the first round of review were published, finding significant security vulnerabilities and a variety of other problems with the three vendors reviewed at the time. (See…
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Radiohead Album Available for Free, But Fileshared Anyway
The band Radiohead is trying an interesting experiment, offering its new album In Rainbows for download and letting each customer decide how much to pay. You can name a price of zero and download the album for free, if you want, or you can pay whatever price you think is fair. Now Andy Greenberg at…
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Response to ITIF Voting Report
[This post was written by David Robinson and me, based on our discussions with Alex Halderman, Joe Calandrino, and Ari Feldman.] On Tuesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation released a report on the possible role of paper trails in auditing elections conducted using DRE machines. The report contained a blend of reasonable and unreasonable…
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E-Voting Ballots Not Secret; Vendors Don't See Problem
Two Ohio researchers have discovered that some of the state’s e-voting machines put a timestamp on each ballot, which severely erodes the secrecy of ballots. The researchers, James Moyer and Jim Cropcho, used the state’s open records law to get access to ballot records, according to Declan McCullagh’s story at news.com. The pair say they…
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More California E-Voting Reports Released; More Bad News
Yesterday the California Secretary of State released the reports of three source code study teams that analyzed the source code of e-voting systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia. Diebold systems Hart InterCivic systems Sequoia systems All three reports found many serious vulnerabilities. It seems likely that computer viruses could be constructed that could infect…
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Where are the California E-Voting Reports?
I wrote Monday about the California Secretary of State’s partial release of report from the state’s e-voting study. Four subteams submitted reports to the Secretary, but as yet only the “red team” and accessibility teams’ reports have been released. The other two sets of reports, from the source code review and documentation review teams, are…
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California Study: Voting Machines Vulnerable; Worse to Come?
A major study of three e-voting systems, commissioned by the California Secretary of State’s office, reported Friday that all three had multiple serious vulnerabilities. The study examined systems from Diebold, Hart InterCivic, and Sequoia; each system included a touch-screen machine, an optical-scan machine, and the associated backend control and tabulation machine. Each system was studied…