Tag: Voting
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NJ Voting Machine Tape Shows Phantom Obama Vote
I’ve written before (1, 2, 3) about discrepancies in the election results from New Jersey’s February 5 presidential primary. Yesterday we received yet another set of voting machine result tapes. They show a new kind of discrepancy which we haven’t seen before – and which contradicts the story told by Sequoia (the vendor) and the…
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Shamos on paper trails
In an interview today with CNet, Michael Shamos talks about paper trails. Shamos is a professor at CMU who has served as a voting system analyst for the Pennsylvania Secretary of State. In this article, a transcript of an interview conducted by Declan McCullagh, he spends a fair bit of time trashing paper trails, and…
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How can we require ID for voters?
Recently, HR 5036 was shot down in Congress. That bill was to provide “emergency” money to help election administrators who wished to replace paperless voting systems with optically scanned paper ballots (or to add paper-printing attachments to existing electronic voting systems). While the bill initially received strong bipartisan support, it was opposed at the last…
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NJ Election Discrepancies Worse Than Previously Thought, Contradict Sequoia's Explanation
I wrote previously about discrepancies in the vote totals reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey’s presidential primary election, and the incomplete explanation offered by Sequoia, the voting machine vendor. I published copies of the “summary tapes” printed by nine voting machines in Union County that showed discrepancies; all of them were…
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California review of the ES&S AutoMARK and M100
California’s Secretary of State has been busy. It appears that ES&S (manufacturers of the Ink-a-Vote voting system, used in Los Angeles, as well as the iVotronic systems that made news in Sarasota, Florida in 2006) submitted its latest and greatest “Unity 3.0.1.1” system for California certification. ES&S systems were also considered by Ohio’s study last…
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Sequoia's Explanation, and Why It's Not the Whole Story
I wrote yesterday about discrepancies in the results reported by Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machines in New Jersey. Sequoia issued a memo giving their explanation for what might have happened. Here’s the relevant part: During a primary election, the “option switches” on the operator panel must be used to activate the voting machine. The operator…
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Evidence of New Jersey Election Discrepancies
Press reports on the recent New Jersey voting discrepancies have been a bit vague about the exact nature of the evidence that showed up on election day. What has the county clerks, and many citizens, so concerned? Today I want to show you some of the evidence. The evidence is a “summary tape” printed by…
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Interesting Email from Sequoia
A copy of an email I received has been passed around on various mailing lists. Several people, including reporters, have asked me to confirm its authenticity. Since everyone seems to have read it already, I might as well publish it here. Yes, it is genuine. ==== Sender: Smith, Ed [address redacted]@sequoiavote.com To: felten@cs.princeton.edu, appel@princeton.edu Subject:…
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pesky details with getting a voting system correct
Today was the last day of early voting in Texas’s primary election. Historically, I have never voted in a primary election. I’ve never felt I identified enough with a particular political party to want to have a say in selecting their candidates. Once I started working on voting security, I discovered that this also allowed…
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The continuing saga of Sarasota's lost votes
At a hearing today before a subcommittee of Congress’s Committee on House Administration, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported on the results of their technical investigation into the exceptional undervote rate in the November 2006 election for Florida’s 13th Congressional District. David Dill and I wrote a long paper about shortcomings in previous investigations,…