Building the People’s Voting System

Tag: pito salas

Bruce Schneier on “Worst Case Thinking”

Although he was talking in a very different context, I still think that Bruce Schneier’s perspectives on worst-case thinking have relevance to us: “Worst-case thinking means generally bad decision making for several reasons. First, it’s only half of the cost-benefit equation. Every decision has costs and benefits, risks and rewards. By speculating about what can … Continued

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ATOMS=GOOD, ELECTRONS=BAD?

Seems to me that I’ve seen more interesting videos, alarming articles, and research studies of problems with e-voting than with old-fashioned hand-count paper ballot elections. We hear about many ways and reasons to doubt election results that use machines in some part of the process, and about how “all manual count” elections are the “gold … Continued

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Hacking “Electronic Voting Machines”

The other day I gave a talk at the Boston Bar Camp 2010 about the work we are doing at TrustTheVote. Over the year or so I’ve been involved I’ve collected some good stories and surprising anecdotes about how elections work and don’t work in the US. After the talk a fellow came over to … Continued

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Risk Limiting Audits: progress

An interesting bit today from UC Berkley about a trial of so-called “Risk Limiting Audits”, advocated by Philip Stark. Apparently it went well, well enough that: “Stark’s technique passed the test and five others, impressing California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, the state’s chief elections officer, and spurring her to sponsor a bill, AB 2023, … Continued

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More thoughts on email voting

Following up on John’s discussion of “Internet Voting” in North Carolina…  Let me pick up the thread from the perspective of Vote By Mail as a point of comparison. I think it’s an interesting comparison because it’s worth asking whether using the Internet makes voting immediately riskier than the model we all know (and some … Continued

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New York Times on Voting Technology

A couple of days the New York Times Editorial page commented on Voting Technology in an editorial titled “The Voters Will Pay”. Some bits that interested me (but you should read the whole thing): “[snip…] If the deal is allowed to go through, it would make it harder for jurisdictions to bargain effectively on price … Continued

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AR vs. UVR?

I came across an interesting article about voter registration: “The Alternative to Universal Voter Registration” where John N. Hall strongly supports Automatic Registration (AR) over Universal Voter Registration (UVR). To people who are not election experts the distinction is a bit subtle. UVR has states proactively try to register everyone to vote, while AR has … Continued

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Yes: security is hard

I came across this article, “NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked.”. The money quote: “The real question, however, remains unanswered – how could USB Flash drives that exhibit such a serious security hole be given one of the highest certificates for crypto devices? Even more importantly, perhaps – what is the value of … Continued

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Open Source e-Voting article in Network World

I came across an interesting article in Network World, “Open Source: How e-voting should be done”, by Paul Venezia of InfoWorld. It’s a good survey and review of some of the arguments in favor of Open Source in the management, conducting and tallying of elections, so I recommend reading it. A couple of thoughts. Paul … Continued

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