Tag: Voting
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Internet Voting: How Far Can We Go Safely?
Yesterday I chaired an interesting panel on Internet Voting at CFP. Participants included Amy Bjelland and Craig Stender (State of Arizona), Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat (Overseas Vote Foundation) Avi Rubin (Johns Hopkins), and Alec Yasinsac (Univ. of South Alabama). Thanks to David Bruggeman and Cameron Wilson at USACM for setting up the panel. Nobody advocated a full-on…
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NJ Voting-machine Trial: Defense Witnesses
I’ve previously summarized my own testimony and other plaintiffs’ witnesses’ testimony in the New Jersey voting machines trial, Gusciora v. Corzine. The defendant is the State of New Jersey (Governor and Secretary of State). The defense case comprised the following witnesses: Defense witness James Clayton, the Ocean County voting machine warehouse supervisor, is a well-intentioned…
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Sunlight on NASED ITA Reports
Short version: we now have gobs of voting system ITA reports, publicly available and hosted by the NSF ACCURATE e-voting center. As I explain below, ITA’s were the Independent Testing Authority laboratories that tested voting systems for many years. Long version: Before the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) took over the testing and certification of voting…
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On open source vs. disclosed source voting systems
Sometimes, working on voting seems like running on a treadmill. Old disagreements need to be argued again and again. As long as I’ve been speaking in public about voting, I’ve discussed the need for voting systems’ source code to be published, as in a book, to create transparency into how the systems operate. Or, put…
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Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners
Today Will Clarkson, Tim Weyrich, Adam Finkelstein, Nadia Heninger, Alex Halderman and I released a paper, Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners. The paper will appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, in May 2009. Here’s the paper’s abstract: This paper presents a novel technique for authenticating physical documents based…
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NJ Voting-machine trial update
Earlier this month I testified in Gusciora v. Corzine, the trial in which the plaintiffs argue that New Jersey’s voting machines (Sequoia AVC Advantage) can’t be trusted to count the votes, because they’re so easily hacked to make them cheat. I’ve previously written about the conclusions of my expert report: in 7 minutes you can…
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Rethinking the voting system certification process
Lawsuits! Everybody’s filing lawsuits. Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold) is suing SysTest, one of the EAC’s testing authorities (or, more properly, former testing authorities, now that the EAC is planning to suspend their accreditation). There’s also a lawsuit between the State of Ohio and Premier over whether or not Premier’s voting systems satisfy Ohio’s requirements.…
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CA SoS Bowen sends proposals to EAC
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen has sent a letter to Chair Gineen Beach of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC) outlining three proposals that she thinks will markedly improve the integrity of voting systems in the country. I’ve put a copy of Bowen’s letter here (87kB PDF). Bowen’s three proposals are: Vulnerability Reporting –…
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Optical-scan voting extremely accurate in Minnesota
The recount of the 2008 Minnesota Senate race gives us an opportunity to evaluate the accuracy of precinct-count optical-scan voting. Though there have been contentious disputes over which absentee ballot envelopes to open, the core technology for scanning ballots has proved to be extremely accurate. The votes were counted by machine (except for part of…
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Internet voting-a-go-go
Yes, we know that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system, but the Estonians are doing their best to get as far away from perfection as possible. According to the latest news reports, Estonia is working up a system to vote from mobile phones. This follows on their earlier web-based Internet voting. What…