Category: Uncategorized
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New Jersey gets ballot-tracking only half right
Two months before the November 2020 election, I wrote about New Jersey’s plans for an almost-all-vote-by-mail election. What I was told by one county’s Administrator of Elections was, New this year is ballot tracking offered on the NJ Division of Elections’ website. The tracking numbers are not USPS tracking–they can’t tell you where inside the U.S. mail your ballot is–but the tracking…
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CITP call for the postdoctoral track of the CITP Fellows Program 2021-22
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. CITP is seeking applications…
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Facial recognition datasets are being widely used despite being taken down due to ethical concerns. Here’s how.
This post describes ongoing research by Kenny Peng, Arunesh Mathur, and Arvind Narayanan. We are grateful to Marshini Chetty for useful feedback. Computer vision research datasets have been criticized for violating subjects’ privacy, reinforcing cultural biases, and enabling questionable applications. But regulating their use is hard. For example, although the DukeMTMC dataset of videos recorded…
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Federal judge denies injunction, so 7 states won’t be forced to accept internet ballot return
In the case of Harley v. Kosinski, Matthew Harley (and 9 other individuals) sued the election officials of 7 states (New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Georgia). The Plaintiffs, U.S. citizens living abroad, said that voting by mail (from abroad) has become so slow and unreliable that these states should be forced to…
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Election Security and Transparency in 2020
Earlier this month I gave a public lecture at the invitation of the Center for Information Technology Policy and the League of Women Voters. The League had asked, “What can we as voters do to protect our elections and our representative government?” The video is available here. A longer video, that includes introductions, Q&A moderated…
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Vote-by-mail meltdowns in 2020?
If your state is voting by mail, then you can’t process all the ballot envelopes on November 3rd — it’s just too labor-intensive. The details vary by state, as every state has different laws, but (basically) for each mail-in ballot received by the county election clerk, they must: Sort the envelopes by “ballot style” (municipality…
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Election Audits in NJ 2020
It has been well understood for more than 15 years that computerized voting machines can be hacked to make them cheat (or might be misconfigured by accident), and therefore it is essential to have random audits of the ballots. That is: Human inspection of paper ballots that the voters marked, of a random sample of…
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Voting by mail in NJ 2020
For hundreds of years, New Jersey voters have voted in their local precinct polling places (800 registered voters per precinct), with only a tiny percentage voting absentee. This year, for reasons of public health in the pandemic, all voters will receive a mail-in ballot; a few polling places will be open on November 3rd for…
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Can the exfiltration of personal data by web trackers be stopped?
by Günes Acar, Steven Englehardt, and Arvind Narayanan. In a series of posts on this blog in 2017/18, we revealed how web trackers exfiltrate personal information from web pages, browser password managers, form inputs, and the Facebook Login API. Our findings resulted in many fixes and privacy improvements to browsers, websites, third parties, and privacy…
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Safely opening PDFs received by e-mail (or fax?!)
Many election administrators in U.S. states and counties need to receive and open PDF files from voters. Some of these administrators receive these PDFs as e-mail attachments. These may be filled-out voter registration forms, or even voted ballots from UOCAVA (overseas and military) voters. We all know that malware can lurk in e-mail attachments; how…
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Democracy Live internet voting: unsurprisingly insecure, and surprisingly insecure
The OmniBallot internet voting system from Democracy Live finds surprising new ways to be insecure, in addition to the usual (severe, fatal) insecurities common to all internet voting systems. There’s a very clear scientific consensus that “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots” because “no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and…
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Emergency Motion to Stop Internet Voting in NJ
with Penny Venetis On May 4th, 2020 a press release from mobilevoting.org announced that New Jersey would allow online voting in a dozen school-board elections scheduled for May 12th. On May 11, the Rutgers International Human Rights Clinic filed an emergency motion to stop internet voting in New Jersey. During a conference on May 18 with Superior…