Dominion Sues to Stop New York City Contract with ES&S

Guest Author Update I, 2/19/10 – Court documents posted, links here In a surprise move, Dominion Voting Systems has filed an Article 78 lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court in Albany to stop the New York City Board of Elections from awarding a $70 million dollar contract for new voting machines to ES&S. If a temporary restraining order is…

Judge Orders Expert Review of Voting Machines in New Jersey

Author: Pamela Smith A judge in New Jersey has ordered a new review of New Jersey’s voting systems, this time by qualified technical experts, in a partial victory for advocates challenging the systems’ constitutionality. State law requires that voting systems be “accurate and reliable.” From our vantage point, these systems don’t meet that standard; because they cannot be audited,…

Software in Dangerous Places

Author: Dan Wallach, Rice University  This article was posted at Freedom to Tinker and is reposted here with permission of the author. Software increasingly manages the world around us, in subtle ways that are often hard to see. Software helps fly our airplanes (in some cases, particularly military fighter aircraft, software is the only thing keeping them…

Hurry Up and Wait: Tennessee Senate Delays, Weakens Voter Confidence Act in the Opening hours of the 2010 Session

On the basis of several highly questionable assumptions, the Tennessee General Assembly has voted to delay implementation of paper ballot voting until 2012, and to eliminate the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act’s provision for routine hand-counted audits of computer vote tallies. On Tuesday, the Tennessee Senate passed House Bill 614 on a vote of 22-10. The Senate’s passage of…

Statewide Databases of Registered Voters: Study Of Accuracy, Privacy, Usability, Security, and Reliability Issues

Verified Voting Board Chair Dr. Barbara Simons co-chaired a study commissioned by the Association for Computing Machinery: Citing the danger of voter fraud and disenfranchisement from poorly implemented databases, a committee of experts commissioned by USACM released a report making almost 100 recommendations to state and local officials charged with creating and managing statewide voter registration databases (VRDs). The report…