Tag: Voting

How did e-voting technologies hold up in Tuesday’s election? It’s too early to tell for sure, but it looks as if there weren’t any major disasters. We saw the usual list of crashing, misbehaving, and non-functional machines. Some of these are just routine glitches or procedural problems. If somebody forgets to deliver power cords to…

I was going about my business this morning when I was surprised to see some unattended electronic voting machines that had already been delivered to a polling place in advance of Tuesday’s election. I wasn’t looking for voting machines in this location, not knowing that it served as a polling place, but the machines were…

The Election Science Institute just released a statement revealing that the memory cards that will be used to store votes on Election Day in Cuyahoga County, Ohio were stuck into ordinary laptop computers in September. The release points to an online video shot by Cleveland-area filmmaker Jeffrey Kirkby, shows a group of election workers sitting…

Yesterday I explained the design error that led Diebold in 2005 to recall and replace the motherboards in thousands of voting machines, most of which had been used in the November 2004 election. Today I’ll talk about how the motherboard flaws might have affected the accuracy of elections. Machines with flawed boards were normally identified…

Diebold replaced the motherboard (i.e., the main electronic component) on about 4700 of Maryland’s AccuVote-TS voting machines in 2005, according to Cameron Barr’s story in Thursday’s Washington Post. The company and state officials kept the recall quiet – even some members of the state’s Board of Elections were unaware of it until contacted by the…

Let’s continue our discussion (1; 2) of Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. I’ve criticized ThreeBallot’s apparent inability to handle write-in votes. More detailed critiques have come from Charlie Strauss (1; 2) and Andrew Appel. Their analysis (especially Charlie’s) is too extensive to repeat here, so I’ll focus on just one of Charlie’s ideas. Recall that ThreeBallot…

Yesterday I wrote about Ron Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system. Today I want to start a discussion of problems with the system. (To reiterate: the purpose of this kind of criticism is not to dump on the designer but to advance our collective understanding of voting system design.) Charlie Strauss and Andrew Appel have more thorough…

ThreeBallot is a new voting method from Ron Rivest that is supposed to make elections more secure without compromising voter privacy. It got favorable reviews at first – Michael Shamos even endorsed it at a congressional hearing – but further analysis shows that it has some serious problems. The story of ThreeBallot and its difficulties…