Category: Uncategorized
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Another 2020 lawsuit over internet voting
Last week I summarized 4 lawsuits filed in 2020 over internet voting, in VA, NJ, NY, NH. Then I learned there was another in North Carolina. In 2020 the North Carolina Council of the Blind sued the State Board of Elections, demanding that the Board offer “alternative format absentee ballots allowing private and independent method…
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Four 2020 lawsuits over internet voting
Citizens with disabilities (and voters living abroad) must have the substantive right to vote—that’s the law. Sometimes that turns into a demand for internet voting. But as I wrote earlier this year, internet voting is dangerously insecure, it’s not what most voters with disabilities want, and there are much better ways of accommodating voters with disabilities,…
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CITP Call for Fellows 2022-23
The Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) is an interdisciplinary center at Princeton University. The Center is a nexus of expertise in technology, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences on campus. In keeping with the strong University tradition of service, the Center’s research, teaching, and events address digital technologies as they interact with society.…
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We need a personal digital advocate
I recently looked up a specialized medical network. For weeks following the search, I was bombarded with ads for the network and other related services: the Internet clearly thought I was on the market for a new doctor. The funny thing is that I was looking this up for someone else and all this information,…
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It’s still practically impossible to secure your computer (or voting machine) against attackers who have 30 minutes of access
It has been understood for decades that it’s practically impossible to secure your computer (or computer-based device such as a voting machine) from attackers who have physical access. The basic principle is that someone with physical access doesn’t have to log in using the password, they can just unscrew your hard drive (or SSD, or…
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Facebook’s Illusory Promise of Transparency
By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Ashley Gorham, Eli Lucherini, Mihir Kshirsagar, and Arvind Narayanan. Facebook’s latest move to obstruct academic research about its platform by disabling NYU’s Ad Observatory is deeply troubling. While Facebook claims to offer researchers access to its FORT Researcher Platform as an alternative, that is an illusory offer as we have recently learned…
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Studying the societal impact of recommender systems using simulation
By Eli Lucherini, Matthew Sun, Amy Winecoff, and Arvind Narayanan. For those interested in the impact of recommender systems on society, we are happy to share several new pieces: a software tool for studying this interface via simulation the accompanying paper a short piece on methodological concerns in simulation research a talk offering a critical…
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Warnings That Work: Combating Misinformation Without Deplatforming
Ben Kaiser, Jonathan Mayer, and J. Nathan Matias This post originally appeared on Lawfare. “They’re killing people.” President Biden lambasted Facebook last week for allowing vaccine misinformation to proliferate on its platform. Facebook issued a sharp rejoinder, highlighting the many steps it has taken to promote accurate public health information and expressing angst about government censorship.…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 2
In my previous post I explained the preliminary conclusions from the three experts engaged by New Hampshire to examine an election anomaly in the town of Windham, November 2020. Improperly folded ballots (which shouldn’t have happened) had folds that were interpreted as votes (which also shouldn’t have happened) and this wasn’t noticed by any routine…
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New Hampshire Election Audit, part 1
Based on preliminary reports published by the team of experts that New Hampshire engaged to examine an election discrepancy, it appears that a buildup of dust in the read heads of optical-scan voting machines (possibly over several years of use) can cause paper-fold lines in absentee ballots to be interpreted as votes. In a local…
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Accommodating voters with disabilities
Citizens with disabilities have as much right to vote as anyone else, and our election systems should fully accommodate them. In recent years some advocates have claimed that electronic ballot return, in other words internet voting, is needed to accommodate voters with disabilities. But internet voting is dangerously insecure–in the context of U.S. public elections…
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Internet Voting is Still Inherently Insecure
Legislation for voting by internet is pending in Colorado, and other states have been on the verge of permitting ballots to be returned by internet. But voting by internet is too insecure, too hackable, to use in U.S. elections. Every scientific study comes to the same conclusion—the Defense Department’s study group in 2004, the National…