Building the People’s Voting System

Author: John Sebes

Voting Heartburn over “Heartbleed”

Heartbleed is the latest high-profile consumer Internet security  issue, only a few weeks after the “Goto Fail” incident. Both are recently discovered weaknesses in the way that browsers and Web sites interact. In both cases and others, I’ve seen several comments that connect these security issues with Internet voting. But because Heartbleed is pretty darn wicked, I can’t not … Continued

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Bishop on Heartbleed

(My thanks to a security colleague Matt Bishop who offered this excellent rant (his term not mine!) on Heartbleed and what we can learn from it, and the connection to open source. You can read riff on it here.) “First, the Heartbleed vulnerability isn’t a virus; you can’t be infected by it. It’s a programming error in one … Continued

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Election Results: Data-Wrangling Los Angeles County

LA County CA is the mother of all election complexities, and the data wrangling was intense, even compared to the hardly simple efforts that I reported on previously. There are over 32,000 distinct voting regions, which I think is more than the number of seats, ridings, chairs, and so on, for every federal or state … Continued

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Election Results: Data-Wrangling Travis County

Congratulations if you are reading this post, after having even glanced at the predecessor about Ramsey County data wrangling — one of the longer and geekier posts in recent times at TrustTheVote. There is a similar but shorter story about our work with Travis County Texas. As with Ramsey, we started with a bunch of stuff … Continued

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Election Results: Data-Wrangling Ramsey County

Next up are several overdue reports on data wrangling of county level election data, that is, working with election officials to get legacy data needed for election results; and then putting the data into practical use. It’s where we write software to chew up whatever data we get, put it in a backend system, re-arrange … Continued

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Election Results Reporting – Assumptions About Standards and Converters

It’s time to finish — in two parts — the long-ish explanation of the assumptions behind our current “VoteStream” prototype stage of the TrustTheVote Project’s Election Result Reporting Platform (ENRS) project. As I said before, it is an exercise in validating some key assumptions, and discovering their limits. Previously, I’ve described our assumptions about election … Continued

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Not Just Election Night: VoteStream

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if you want people to understand what a software package does, it needs a good name. In our Election Night Reporting System project, we’ve learned that it’s not just about election night, and it’s not just about reporting either. Even before election night, a … Continued

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