Building the People’s Voting System

Author: John Sebes

Internet Voting, Google, and the China Syndrome

Thanks again to David Jefferson for his post yesterday on the lessons for Internet voting of the Google/China news (NYT: In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity). To answer some follow-up questions, I’ll explain a bit about the term vote servers that David referred to. Let’s start with a little background on Internet voting. … Continued

Read More

Why Publish Ballots?

I’d like to thank Eric Rescorla for making an excellent and pithy point about the purpose of publishing images of  marked ballots.  But first, thanks (again) to Mitch Trachtenberg of the Humboldt Transparency Project for publishing a hand-picked set of ballot images that provide a great example of the difficult borderline cases of interpreting hard-marked … Continued

Read More

Shelfware or Liveware?

I’d like to answer a fine question posed by Jered in a comment to a blog posted by my esteemed colleague Pito Salas. Jered allowed as how the basic idea of OSDV was a fine idea, but asked “What’s the plan to get OSDV-based systems deployed?” A great question, but where I differ with Jered … Continued

Read More

OSDV Responds to FCC Inquiry about Internet Voting

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked for public comment on the use of the Internet for election-related activities (among other digital democracy related matters).  They recently published the responses, including those from OSDV.  I’ll let Greg highlight the particularly public-policy-related questions and answers, but I wanted to highlight some aspects of our response that differ … Continued

Read More

More Good News for Military Voters

We’re certainly seeing a “holiday rush” from Bob Carey and crew at the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which provides voting assistance to military and overseas voters. Following the announcement that I wrote about recently, we now hear that the DoD has agreed to make a major contribution to military voter enfranchisement – details at nytimes.com … Continued

Read More

Federal Government to Build Overseas Voting System

There is some very interesting news today out of the U.S. government organization, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which provides voting assistance to military and overseas voters. FVAP announced their intent to embark on a path to the creation of software tools to help voters abroad with obtaining ballots, specifically: FVAP Director Bob Carey recently … Continued

Read More

Voting System Certified in New York

New York state recently certified two voting systems, and the end of the process is an interesting insight into current certification and standards — particularly the view of the dissent-voting participant, Bo Lipari, who explained his vote in his blog My Vote on NY Voting Machine Certification. It’s certainly worth reading Bo’s complete rationale, but … Continued

Read More

Election Equipment Stolen, Election Not Stolen

Thanks to erstwhile election texpert Dan Wallach for bring attention to the burglary of an early voting center in Houston, and to the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Moran for coverage of the story including good quotes from Dan! But I have to add that in addition to theft of computers containing voter records, there were also … Continued

Read More

Transparency: Government Offers Data to Mine

In the next step on the topic of voting machines and transparency, let me explain what I meant in a previous posting about a “side effect” of adoption of TTV technology for machine counts of optically scanned ballots. The ballot counting software, like pretty much all we make, logs the heck out of everything, and … Continued

Read More

SITEWIDE SEARCH