Category: Other Topics
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End-to-End Verifiable Elections
As of 2018, the clear scientific consensus is that 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 of the human-readable portion of…
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Cheating with paper ballots
In my previous article, I discussed 10 ways that voting machines could cheat, in ballot-marking, ballot-scanning, and ballot tabulating; and I discussed which of these cheats could be caught and corrected during risk-limiting audits and recounts of the paper ballots. In particular, cheat-methods 1, 2, 5, and 7 will be detected/corrected by audits/recounts; methods 3,4,6,8,9,10…
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Ten ways to make voting machines cheat with plausible deniability
Summary: Voting machines can be hacked; risk-limiting audits of paper ballots can detect incorrect outcomes, whether from hacked voting machines or programming inaccuracies; recounts of paper ballots can correct those outcomes; but some methods for producing paper ballots are more auditable and recountable than others. A now-standard principle of computer-counted public elections is, use a voter-verified…
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An unverifiability principle for voting machines
In my last three articles I described the ES&S ExpressVote, the Dominion ImageCast Evolution, and the Dominion ImageCast X (in its DRE+VVPAT configuration). There’s something they all have in common: they all violate a certain principle of voter verifiability. Any voting machine whose physical hardware can print votes onto the ballot after the last time…
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Continuous-roll VVPAT under glass: an idea whose time has passed
States and counties should not adopt DRE+VVPAT voting machines such as the Dominion ImageCast X and the ES&S ExpressVote. Here’s why. Touchscreen voting machines (direct-recording electronic, DRE) cannot be trusted to count votes, because (like any voting computer) a hacker may have installed fraudulent software that steals votes from one candidate and gives them to…
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Design flaw in Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine
The Dominion ImageCast Evolution looks like a pretty good voting machine, but it has a serious design flaw: after you mark your ballot, after you review your ballot, the voting machine can print more votes on it!. Fortunately, this design flaw has been patented by a rival company, ES&S, which sued to prevent Dominion from selling…
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Serious design flaw in ESS ExpressVote touchscreen: “permission to cheat”
Kansas, Delaware, and New Jersey are in the process of purchasing voting machines with a serious design flaw, and they should reconsider while there is still time! Over the past 15 years, almost all the states have moved away from paperless touchscreen voting systems (DREs) to optical-scan paper ballots. They’ve done so because if a…
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Securing the Vote — National Academies report
In this November’s election, could a computer hacker, foreign or domestic, alter votes (in the voting machine) or prevent people from voting (by altering voter registrations)? What should we do to protect ourselves? The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine have released a report, Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy about the cybervulnerabilities in U.S. election…
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Why PhD experiences are so variable and what you can do about it
People who do PhDs seem to have either strongly positive or strongly negative experiences — for some, it’s the best time of their lives, while others regret the decision to do a PhD. Few career choices involve such a colossal time commitment, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether a PhD is right for you,…
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Can Classes on Field Experiments Scale? Lessons from SOC412
Last semester, I taught a Princeton undergrad/grad seminar on the craft, politics, and ethics of behavioral experimentation. The idea was simple: since large-scale human subjects research is now common outside universities, we need to equip students to make sense of that kind of power and think critically about it. In this post, I share lessons for teaching…
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Teaching the Craft, Ethics, and Politics of Field Experiments
How can we manage the politics and ethics of large-scale online behavioral research? When this question came up in April during a forum on Defending Democracy at Princeton, Ed Felten mentioned on stage that I was teaching a Princeton undergrad class on this very topic. No pressure! Ed was right about the need: people with…
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Refining the Concept of a Nutritional Label for Data and Models
By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Drexel University) and Bill Howe (Associate Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington) In August 2016, Julia Stoyanovich and Ellen P. Goodman spoke in this forum about the importance of bringing interpretability to the algorithmic transparency debate. They focused on algorithmic rankers, discussed the harms…