Tag: Voting

The League of Women Voters last week rescinded its support for paperless e-voting machines. The decision was driven by grassroots support among the League’s members, overriding a previous policy that was, according to rumor, decreed originally by a single member of the League’s staff. (I can’t find this story on the public part of the…

There are two interesting new posts on e-voting over on ATAC. In one post, Avi Rubin suggests a “hacking challenge” for e-voting technology: let experts tweak an existing e-voting system to rig it for one candidate, and then inject the tweaked system quietly into the certification pipeline and see if it passes. (All of this…

E-voting vendors often argue that their systems must be secure, because they have been tested by “independent” labs. Elise Ackerman’s story in Sunday’s San Jose Mercury-News explains the depressing truth about how the testing process works. There are only three labs, and they are overseen by a private body that is supported financially by the…

In Miami-Dade County, Florida, an internal county memo has come to light, documenting misrecording of votes by ES&S e-voting machines in a May 2003 election, according to a Matthew Haggman story in the Miami Daily Business Review. The memo, written by Orlando Suarez, head of the county’s Enterprise Technology Services Department, describes Mr. Suarez’s examination…

Looks like I missed the significance of this story last week (by Kim Zetter at Wired News). California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines, not just the Diebold systems whose decertification had been recommended by the state’s voting-systems panel. Some counties may be able to get their machines recertified if they…

The State of California’s Voting Systems Panel has voted to recommend the decertification of Diebold’s TSx e-voting system, according to a release from verifiedvoting.org. The final decision will be made by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, but he is expected to approve the recommendation within the next week. The TSx is only one of the…

Diebold Election Systems knowingly used uncertified software in California elections, despite warnings from its lawyers that doing so was illegal and might subject the company to criminal sanctions and decertification in California, according to Ian Hoffman’s story in the Oakland Tribune. The story says that Diebold made false representations about certification to state officials: The…

Yesterday, I had a chance, with some colleagues, to look over the new e-voting machines that will be used in the future here in Mercer County, New Jersey. They’re AVC Advantage machines, made by Sequoia. The machines were available for public inspection at Princeton Borough Hall. (They’re available today too, at the Suzanne Patterson Center,…

From Kim Zetter at wired.com comes the story at of the recent Napa County, California election. Napa County uses paper ballots that are marked by the voter with a pen or pencil, and counted by an optical scanner machine. Due to a miscalibrated scanner, some valid votes went uncounted, as the scanner failed to detect…

Avi Rubin, the John Hopkins computer science professor and leading critic of e-voting, has posted a fascinating account of his day as an election judge in Baltimore, Maryland, using the new Diebold machines. UPDATE (11:00 AM): It must be noted that the polling place where Avi worked was not typical. Everybody seemed to know in…