CITP Blog is hosted by Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, a research center that studies digital technologies in public life. Here you’ll find comment and analysis from the digital frontier, written by the Center’s faculty, students, and friends.
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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…
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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…
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GPT-3 Raises Complex Questions for Philosophy and Policy
GPT-3, a powerful, 175 billion parameter language model developed recently by OpenAI, has been galvanizing public debate and controversy. As the MIT Technology Review puts it: “OpenAI’s new language generator…
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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…
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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…
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NJ agrees No Internet voting in July, vague about November
A formal settlement agreement has been submitted to the NJ Superior Court regarding online ballot access in the 2020 elections. On May 4, 2020, New Jersey’s Division of Elections was…
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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…
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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…
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Fair Elections During a Crisis
Even before the crisis of COVID-19, which will have severe implications for the conduct of the 2020 elections, the United States faced another elections crisis of legitimacy: Americans can no…
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Can Legislatures Safely Vote by Internet?
It is a well understood scientific fact that Internet voting in public elections is not securable: “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots. … [N]o…