Tag: Voting

evoting-experts.com is a new group blog devoted to e-voting issues. Members include leading experts on the technology, including David Dill, Ed Felten, Joe Hall, Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach (with more to come, we hope). The site’s goal is to provide one-stop shopping for e-voting news and analysis, to the public and the…

Voters casting early ballots in New Mexico report that the state’s touchscreen voting machines sometimes record a vote for the wrong candidate, according to a Jim Ludwick story in the Albuquerque Journal. (Link via DocBug) [Kim Griffith] went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. “I pushed his…

The November 2nd election hasn’t even happened yet, and already the e-voting industry is making excuses for the election-day failures of their technology. That’s right – they’re rebutting future reports of future failures. Here’s a sample: Problem Voting machines will not turn on or operate. Explanation Voting machines are not connected to an active power…

Yesterday I wrote about a terribly weak security protocol in the Diebold AccuVote-TS system (at least as it existed in 2002), as reported in a talk by Dan Wallach. That wasn’t the only broken Diebold protocol Dan discussed. Here’s another one which may be even scarier. The Diebold system allows a polling place administrator to…

Dan Wallach from Rice University was here on Monday and gave a talk on e-voting. One of the examples in his talk was interesting enough that I thought I would share it with you, both as an introductory example of how security analysts think, and as an illustration of how badly Diebold botched the design…

Absentee ballots are a common vector for election fraud, and several U.S. states have inadquate safeguards in their handling, according to a Michael story in today’s New York Times. The story recounts many examples of absentee ballot fraud, including blatant vote-buying. For in-person voting, polling-place procedures help to authenticate voters and to ensure that votes…

Avi Rubin, Adam Stubblefield, and I just released a paper analyzing the reported voting data from the recent Venezuelan election. The paper is available at http://www.venezuela-referendum.com, in both English and Spanish versions. Here is the “Summary” section of (the English version of) the paper: After the August 15 referendum in Venezuela on whether or not…

Various groups that oppose paperless electronic voting have recommended an alternative: if you really want to be sure your vote is counted, vote absentee. Having studied e-voting, and living in a county with paperless e-voting, I sympathize with the desire for an alternative. But it should be noted that absentee voting offers iffy security as…

On August 15, Venezuelans voted in a national referendum on whether to remove President Hugo Chavez. The (Chavez-run) government announced afterward that 58% had voted to keep Chavez in office. The opposition claimed fraud. The election was held on electronic voting machines. Fortunately, the machines generated a voter-verified paper trail, so that there was some…

Tomorrow, July 13, is “Computer Ate My Vote Day”. Rallies will be held in many states across the U.S, to ask state officials to use safe and reliable voting technologies. I’ll be speaking at the New Jersey rally, at noon on the steps of the State House in Trenton.