Want to Know if the Election was Hacked? Look at the Ballots

This response was originally posted at Medium.com and is cross-posted here with permission of the author. You may have read at NYMag that I’ve been in discussions with the Clinton campaign about whether it might wish to seek recounts in critical states. That article, which includes somebody else’s description of my views, incorrectly describes the reasons…

Election Integrity: Missing Components to Remedy

Author: Candice Hoke This oped appeared originally at the The Hill on November 8, 2016. Our election systems’ vulnerabilities received unprecedented bipartisan and media attention from mid-summer onward, sparked by the apparently Russian origins of hacks into the Democrat’s communications systems. If tampering with the U.S. election process was a goal, then election technologies used…

Security Against Election Hacking – Part 1: Software Independence

Author: Andrew W. Appel This article was originally posted to Freedom to Tinker on August 17, 2016. There’s been a lot of discussion of whether the November 2016 U.S. election can be hacked. Should the U.S. Government designate all the states’ and counties’ election computers as “critical cyber infrastructure” and prioritize the “cyberdefense” of these…

How Not to Measure Security

Author: Jeremy Epstein This article was originally posted at Freedom to Tinker on August 10, 2015. It is reposted here with permission of the author. A recent paper published by Smartmatic, a vendor of voting systems, caught my attention. The first thing is that it’s published by Springer, which typically publishes peer-reviewed articles – which…

Verified Voting Applauds Findings in Presidential Commission Report on Elections

Today’s landmark report by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA), The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, recognizes many of the obstacles and opportunities in today’s election administration universe, and proposes several excellent approaches to solving some of those challenges. “We applaud the bi-partisan Commission’s substantial work,…

Recommendations to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration

Author: Pamela Smith The Presidential Commission on Election Administration will meet again today in Denver, Colorado. The Webcast can be linked to via the Commission website. Verified Voting has submitted the following recommendations to the Commission. I. Contingency Planning and Eliminating Long Lines On Election Day, long lines were produced in many cases due to voting…

Developing a Framework to Improve Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity

Under Executive Order 13636 [2] (“Executive Order”), the Secretary of Commerce is tasked to direct the Director of NIST to develop a framework for reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure (the “Cybersecurity Framework” or “Framework”). The Framework will consist of standards, methodologies, procedures and processes that align policy, business, and technological approaches to address cyber risks. The Department…

Letter to the President

Download Verified Voting’s letter to President Barack Obama (PDF) December 5, 2012 The Honorable Barack Obama President of the United States The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. Washington, DC 20500 Dear President Obama: We agree wholeheartedly with your call to eliminate long lines in voting. Citizens should not have to choose between waiting for…

Computer Technologists’ Statement on Internet Voting

Because of the increasing frequency of proposals to allow remote voting over the internet, we believe it is necessary to warn policymakers and the public that secure internet voting is a very hard technical problem, and that we should proceed with internet voting schemes only after thorough consideration of the technical and non-technical issues in…