Tag: Voting
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Internet Voting Snafu at USRowing
USRowing, the governing body for the sport of rowing in the U.S., recently announced the discovery of likely fraud in one of its leadership elections. Further investigation into this region’s voting resulted in the determination that fraudulent ballots were cast in the Mid-Atlantic election that directly affected the outcome of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director of…
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Internet Voting Security: Wishful Thinking Doesn’t Make It True
[The following is a post written at my invitation by Professor Duncan Buell from the University of South Carolina. Curiously, the poll Professor Buell mentions below is no longer listed in the list of past & present polls on the Courier-Journal site, but is available if you kept the link.] On Thursday, March 21, in…
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White House Statement on Cell Phone Unlocking: A First Step Toward DMCA Reform?
Yesterday, the White House officially responded to the online petition to “Make Unlocking Cell Phones Legal,” which garnered more than 100,000 signatures in under 30 days. The Administration’s headline was emphatic: “It’s Time to Legalize Cell Phone Unlocking.” The tech press heralded this significant but symbolic first step in addressing some of the most egregious…
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How much does a botnet cost, and the impact on internet voting
A brief article on how much botnets cost to rent (more detail here) shows differing prices depending on whether you want US machines, European machines, etc. Interestingly, the highest prices go to botnets composed of US machines, presumably because the owners of those machines have more purchasing power and hence stealing credentials from those machines…
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My NYT Op-Ed: "Beware the Smart Campaign"
I just published a new opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled “Beware the Smart Campaign”. I react to the Obama campaign’s successful use of highly quantitative voter targeting that is inspired by “big data” commercial marketing techniques and implemented through state-of-the-art social science knowledge and randomized field experiments. In the op-ed, I wonder…
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The Silver Effect: What We Can Learn from Poll Aggregators
For those who now think Nate Silver is god, here’s a question: Can Nate Silver make a prediction so accurate that Nate Silver himself doesn’t believe it? Yes, he can–and he did. Silver famously predicted the results of Election 2012 correctly in every state. Yet while his per-state predictions added up to the 332 electoral…
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Tim Lee Reporting on NJ Email-Assisted Voting
Earlier this week, Professor Andrew Appel posted that “NJ Lt. Governor invites voters to submit invalid ballots“. Andrew has been offering updates at the bottom of his post since then. Professor Ed Felten also summarized the state of “New Jersey Voting in the Aftermath of Hurricane Sandy,” concluding that, “I would strongly oppose any long-term…
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Get Out the Vote, Cee-Lo Style?
This semester, Ed Felten and I are teaching a Freshman Seminar called “Facebook: The Social Impact of Social Networks.” This week, the class is discussing a recent article published in the journal Nature, entitled “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization“. The study reveals that if Facebook shows you a list of your…
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Romance & "Reality" in the 2012 Presidential Campaign
Romance and “reality” are in conflict as the 2012 Presidential campaign approaches its election day apex. While the 2012 Presidential campaign lacks the historical resonance of the 2008 campaign, the 2012 campaign is notable, in part, for the attention many are giving to the quantitative analysis of polling data, most famously prepared by Nate Silver.…
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Grading the absentee-in-person experience in Virginia
[Each year, I write a “my day as a pollworker” report. This year, I’m not a pollworker, or election officer in Virginia parlance, for a variety of reasons, so I decided to write about my voting experience.] I just got back from “in-person absentee voting”. This is similar to but not the same as early…