Category: Voting

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…

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…

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:…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…