Tag: Voting

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…

Today is a major primary election in several U.S. states. In Maryland, it will be the first use of the controversial new Diebold e-voting machines that were the subject of several negative security evaluations. Unless there are very large, obvious problems today, expect stories later in the week in which e-voting advocates say there were…

A group of Californians has filed a lawsuit in state court against voting machine vendor Diebold, in advance of the March 2 primary election. The complaint asks the court to order Diebold to do three main things: (1) to refrain from further violations of state election laws and regulations, such as installing uncertified software for…

One of the challenges of blogging is finding things to write about. If you want to keep a loyal audience, you have to write regularly; and sometimes it’s hard to come up with several topics a week. Happily, whenever the well is about to run dry, I can always count on Diebold to fail a…

A group of ex-NSA security experts, hired by the state of Maryland to evaluate the state’s Diebold electronic voting systems, found the systems riddled with basic security flaws. This confirmed two previous studies, one led by Johns Hopkins researchers and one by SAIC. Here are some excerpts from John Schwartz’s New York Times story: Electronic…

Four respected computer scientists, members of a government-commissioned study panel, have published a report critical of SERVE, a proposed system to let overseas military people vote in elections via a website. (Links: the report itself; John Schwartz story at N.Y. Times; Dan Keating story at Washington Post.) The report’s authors are David Jefferson, Avi Rubin,…

Lately it seems that we’ve seen one story after another about the carelessness of e-voting vendors, especially Diebold. Here are two. (1) Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation (who has been, in my experience, a reliable source of information) reported this: This afternoon [apparently Tuesday – EF] I attended a meeting of the California…

In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Krim reports on a new effort by the e-voting machine vendors to do … something or other. The article, which is titled “Voting-Machine Makers to Fight Security Criticism”, doesn’t quite say what they’re planning to do. The following two paragraphs come the closest to revealing their plans: Electronic-voting-machine companies announced…

The Ohio Secretary of State has announced the results of a study his office commissioned, which examined four e-voting systems. If you have been following this issue, you won’t be surprised to hear that the study found many flaws in the systems. Each system had at least one “high risk” problem. In addition, a study…