Category: Uncategorized
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Juan Gilbert’s Transparent BMD
Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy recently hosted a talk by Professor Juan Gilbert of the University of Florida, in which he demonstrated his interesting new invention and presented results from user studies. What’s the problem with ballot-marking devices? It’s well known that a voting system must use paper ballots to be trustworthy (at least…
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Expert analysis of Antrim County, Michigan
Preliminary unofficial election results posted at 4am after the November 3rd 2020 election, by election administrators in Antrim County Michigan, were incorrect by thousands of votes–in the Presidential race and in local races. Within days, Antrim County election administrators corrected the error, as confirmed by a full hand recount of the ballots, but everyone wondered:…
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How lever-action voting machines really worked
Over the years I have written many articles about direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, precinct-count optical-scan (PCOS) voting machines, ballot-marking devices (BMDs), and other 21st-century voting technology. But I haven’t written much about 20th-century lever machines; these machines were banned by the U.S. Congress in the Help America Vote Act and have not been used…
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CITP is Hiring a Communications Manager
The Communications Manager at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) will serve as the lead for all external and internal communications efforts of the center. This will include developing CITP’s content strategy and managing the center’s website, Freedom to Tinker blog, and social media presence. The position requires coordination and collaboration with researchers at…
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AI Nation podcast, from CITP and WHYY
I’m excited to introduce AI Nation: a podcast about AI, everyday life, and what happens when we delegate vital decisions to machines. It’s a collaboration, born at CITP, between Princeton University and WHYY, Philadelphia’s famous NPR station. The first episode drops on April 1. Tune in, and you’ll hear a variety of voices. You’ll hear…
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Voting Machine Hashcode Testing: Unsurprisingly insecure, and surprisingly insecure
By Andrew Appel and Susan Greenhalgh The accuracy of a voting machine is dependent on the software that runs it. If that software is corrupted or hacked, it can misreport the votes. There is a common assumption that we can check the legitimacy of the software that is installed by checking a “hash code” and…
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Georgia’s election certification avoided an even worse nightmare that’s just waiting to happen next time
Voters in Georgia polling places, 2020, used Ballot-Marking Devices (BMDs), touchscreen computers that print out paper ballots; then voters fed those ballots into Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines for tabulation. There were many allegations about hacking of Georgia’s Presidential election. Based on the statewide audit, we can know that the PCOS machines were not…
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Using an Old Model for New Questions on Influence Operations
Alicia Wanless, Kristen DeCaires Gall, and Jacob N. ShapiroFreedom to Tinker: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/ Expanding the knowledge base around influence operations has proven challenging, despite known threats to elections,COVID-related misinformation circulating worldwide, and recent tragic events at the U.S. Capitol fueled in part by political misinformation and conspiracy theories. Credible, replicable evidence from highly sensitive data can be difficult…
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CITP’s Summer Fellowship Program for Training Public Interest Technologists
In 2020, CITP launched the Public Interest Technology Summer Fellowship (PIT-SF) program aimed at rising juniors and seniors interested in getting first-hand experience working on technology policy at the federal, state and local level. The program is supported by the PIT-UN network and accepts students from member universities. We pay students a stipend and cover…
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ESS voting machine company sends threats
For over 15 years, election security experts and election integrity advocates have been communicating to their state and local election officials the dangers of touch-screen voting machines. The danger is simple: if fraudulent software is installed in the voting machine, it can steal votes in a way that a recount wouldn’t be able to detect…
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How programmers communicate through code, legally
Computer programming, especially in source code, is an expressive form of communication. As such, U.S. law recognizes that communication in the form of source code is protected as freedom of speech by the First Amendment. Recently, Judge G. Murray Snow got this only two-thirds right in a ruling in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.…
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Did Sean Hannity misquote me?
Mostly, I was quoted accurately, although the segment confuses a few different Dominion voting systems with each other. And vulnerabilities are not the same as rigged elections, especially when we have paper ballots in almost all the states. On November 13, 2020, Fox News aired a segment by Sean Hannity, “A deep dive into the…