For most Americans the election has been over for two weeks, but for the state and local officials tasked with administering elections the process continues. Most jurisdictions are involved in the certification process, during which vote totals are confirmed, absentee ballots are tabulated and the status of provisional ballots are determined. Over half the states…
Author: Bo Lipari The 2010 elections quietly marked a milestone in election technology history. For the first time in over a hundred years, this was the first national election in which mechanical lever machines were not used. Lever machines were at one time so ubiquitous in US culture that the phrase “pull the lever” is…
Author: Dan Wallach Back in late August, Harris County (Houston)’s warehouse with all 10,000 of our voting machines, burned to the ground. As I blogged at the time, our county decided to spend roughly $14 million of its $40 million insurance settlement on purchasing replacement electronic voting machines of the same type destroyed in the fire,…
Author: Barbara Simons, David Jefferson and Jeremy Epstein Last month, the District conducted an Internet voting experiment that resulted in a team from the University of Michigan infiltrating election computers so completely that they were able to modify every ballot cast and all election outcomes without ever leaving their offices. They also retrieved the username…
Douglas Jones is a voting technology expert on the computer science faculty at the University of Iowa who has done extensive study of the ES&S iVotronic direct recording voting machine. In this interview he offers his insights on reports of straight-party voting problems on iVotronics in multiple North Carolina counties. Q: Are you familiar with this type…
Again this election cycle, stories have emerged about “vote flipping”, most notably in Texas, where a video of erratic touchscreen behavior was posted on several sites, and in several North Carolina counties. (link, link, link, link) As voting technology expert Douglas Jones wrote several years ago, it seems unlikely that vote flipping is evidence of intentional hacking. However, these incidents do highlight…
Voter-marked paper ballots dominate among U.S. voting methods, but one fourth of voters still depend on unverifiable equipment Verified Voting has released a new version of the Verifier, a map of voting technology used throughout the United States and territories, along with a statistical summary of voting technology that States will use this November. The…
Author: J. Alex Halderman This article was posted at Ed Felten’s “Freedom to Tinker” blog and is re-posted with permission. The District of Columbia is conducting a pilot project to allow overseas and military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the Internet. Before opening the system to real voters, D.C. has been holding…
Author: Sean Flaherty Post-election audits of electronic vote tallies are inexpensive. The process is simple: a sample of precincts (or batches of ballots that have been tallied electronically) is chosen randomly, counted by hand, and compared to the corresponding computer tally. To mention just two examples, North Carolina conducted an audit of the Presidential election…
Guest Author For years, computer security experts have said that casting ballots using the Internet cannot be done securely. Now, after a team from the University of Michigan successfully hacked the Washington D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics (DCBOEE) public test of Internet voting, we have a visceral demonstration of just how serious the threats…