Category: Voting
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Mobile Voting Project’s vote-by-smartphone has real security gaps
Bradley Tusk has been pushing the concept of “vote by phone.” Most recently his “Mobile Voting Foundation” put out a press release touting something called “VoteSecure”, claiming that “secure and verifiable mobile voting is within reach.” Based on my analysis of VoteSecure, I can say that secure and verifiable mobile voting is NOT within reach. It’s…
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Reports on the Hart Verity Vanguard Voting Machines
Most U.S. election jurisdictions (states, counties, cities, or other subjurisdictions) use voting machines to tally votes, and in some cases also to mark votes on paper. In most U.S. states, before a jurisdiction within the state can adopt the use of a particular voting machine, the Secretary of State appoints a committee to examine the…
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Newly-Retired Andrew Appel Reflects on his Voting Machine Advocacy
by Yaakov Zinberg ‘23 During the first week of the 2009 spring semester, Andrew Appel ’81, Princeton’s Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science, made the short trip down Route 1 to Trenton’s Superior Court. He was asked to serve as an expert witness in a New Jersey trial in which the state was accused of…
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Paper fingerprinting and ballot tracking
In part 1 of this 2-part series I explained: Some election-integrity advocates have suggested that, in addition to good chain-of-custody procedures for ballots between when they’re cast and when they’re counted (or recounted), we should have better control over what paper (and paper ballots) go into the polling place. This way, if fraudulent ballots got…
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Flaky paper won’t secure our elections without a protocol to go with it
Part 1 of a 2-part series. In this part, why just printing ballots on special paper won’t help much. In part 2, how special paper could have a role if the rest of the system were developed to go with it. How can we best ensure that the ballots tallied are the same ones that…
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CAC-Vote: Another Insecure Internet Voting System
Philip Stark and I have released this paper with an analysis of a DARPA-sponsored research project to develop an internet voting system. An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways Abstract: The recently published “MERGE” protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit votes…
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Rows and Columns, the County Line, and the ExpressVote XL
Why did New Jersey counties keep choosing one insecure voting machine after another, for decades? Only this year did I realize what the reason might be. A century ago, New Jersey (like many other states) adopted lever voting machines that listed the offices by row, with the parties (and their candidates) across the columns: The…
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Barcodes on paper ballots: the good, the bad, and the stealth
Paper ballots should not have barcodes to mark votes; paper ballots should have barcodes to mark ballot styles. Why is that? What’s the difference? And at the end, I describe a useful innovation from a company called Voting.works. One of the most important reasons we use paper ballots in elections is to protect our elections…
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Suggested Principles for State Statutes Regarding Ballot Marking and Vote Tabulation
This letter, signed by more than 20 election cybersecurity experts, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State Senate Committee on Government in response to a request for policy advice, but it applies in any state — especially those that use Ballot Marking Devices for all in-person voters: Georgia and South Carolina; most counties in Arkansas, New…
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Switzerland’s e-voting system has predictable implementation blunder
Last year, I published a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system. Like any internet voting system, it has inherent security vulnerabilities: if there are malicious insiders, they can corrupt the vote count; and if thousands of voters’ computers are hacked by malware, the malware can change votes as they are transmitted. Switzerland “solves” the…