Tag: Voting
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NJ Voting-machine trial update
Earlier this month I testified in Gusciora v. Corzine, the trial in which the plaintiffs argue that New Jersey’s voting machines (Sequoia AVC Advantage) can’t be trusted to count the votes, because they’re so easily hacked to make them cheat. I’ve previously written about the conclusions of my expert report: in 7 minutes you can…
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Rethinking the voting system certification process
Lawsuits! Everybody’s filing lawsuits. Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) is suing SysTest, one of the EAC’s testing authorities (or, more properly, former testing authorities, now that the EAC is planning to suspend their accreditation). There’s also a lawsuit between the State of Ohio and Premier over whether or not Premier’s voting systems satisfy Ohio’s requirements.…
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CA SoS Bowen sends proposals to EAC
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to Chair Gineen Beach of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) outlining three proposals that she thinks will markedly improve the integrity of voting systems in the country. I’ve put a copy of Bowen’s letter here (87kB PDF). Bowen’s three proposals are: Vulnerability Reporting –…
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Optical-scan voting extremely accurate in Minnesota
The recount of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race gives us an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of precinct-count optical-scan voting. Though there have been contentious disputes over which absentee ballot envelopes to open, the core technology for scanning ballots has proved to be extremely accurate. The votes were counted by machine (except for part of…
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Internet voting-a-go-go
Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What…
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Security Seals on AVC Advantage Voting Machines are Easily Defeated
On September 2, 2008, I submitted a report to the New Jersey Superior Court, demonstrating that the DRE voting machines used in New Jersey are insecure: it is easy to replace the vote-counting program with one that fraudulently shifts votes from one candidate to another. In Section 10 of my report, I explained that There…
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Election Transparency Project Finds Ballot-Counting Bug
Yesterday, Kim Zetter at Wired News reported an amazing e-voting story about lost ballots and the public advocates who found them. Here’s a summary: Humboldt County, California has an innovative program to put on the Internet scanned images of all the optical-scan ballots cast in the county. In the online archive, citizens found 197 ballots…
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On the future of voting technologies: simplicity vs. sophistication
Yesterday, I testified before a hearing of Colorado’s Election Reform Commission. I made a small plug, at the end of my testimony, for a future generation of electronic voting machines that would use crypto machinery for end-to-end / software independent verification. Normally, the politicos tend to ignore this and focus on the immediately actionable stuff…
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Discerning Voter Intent in the Minnesota Recount
Minnesota election officials are hand-counting millions of ballots, as they perform a full recount in the ultra-close Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. Minnesota Public Radio offers a fascinating gallery of ballots that generated disputes about voter intent. A good example is this one: A scanning machine would see the Coleman and Franken…
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Total Election Awareness
Ed recently made a number of predictions about election day (“Election 2008: What Might Go Wrong”). In terms of long lines and voting machine problems, his predictions were pretty spot on. On election day, I was one of a number of volunteers for the Election Protection Coalition at one of 25 call centers around the…