Building the People’s Voting System

Tag: voting

NBC News, Voting Machines, and a Grandmother’s PC

  I’d like to explain more precisely what I meant by “your grandmother’s PC” in the NBC TV Bay Area’s report on election technology. Several people thought I was referring to voting machines as easily hacked by anyone with physical access, because despite appearances: Voting machines are like regular old PCs inside, and like any … Continued

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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

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Barbara Simons on Voter Registration

We have a special treat today with a guest blog from Barbara Simons, an eminent computer scientist who is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. (More on Barbara: her bio.) She has an excellent account of part of the story about where voter registration came from, and why it is … Continued

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Internet Voting: Perils and Summary

No, I am not going to lecture on why Internet voting is bad for half a dozen different reasons. In fact, Internet voting is both a horribly loaded term, and also a general topic that is not germane to our current work at OSDV — which is technologically fixing the election technology mess that we are in, without also trying to change the way elections work.

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Trusting Neither People, Paper, or Computers: Hybrid Voting Scheme

In a previous posting, I referred to paper ballots as part of a recipe for election procedures that provide provide integrity and assurance by not relying solely on either computers or people to operate perfectly. As promised, here is some more info, especially important because there seems to be an increasing trend towards a "hybrid" style of election operations with both paper ballots and a variant of computerized voting.

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Re-inventing How America Votes — Now More Relevant Than Ever

In a previous post, I noted two things we’ve learned from this election. The first (and subject of that post) is to what extent the Internet has changed the way elections are conducted. The second, and the focus here, is to what extent the election taught us anything about the need to re-invent HOW America votes.

In the past two days, I’ve been asked several times whether the election, as it turned out, reduces the importance of our Project or not. Seriously.

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House Panel OKs “Voting Paper Trail” Bill

I thought that today’s news about e-voting and legislation is notable as an example of the way voting technology and policy interact in our unique U.S. voting system.

First, what was Congress working on? Crafting legislation about elections; one bill to authorize payments to states for efforts to put in place paper ballots or paper audits for the November 2008 election, and another that effectively over-rules 21 states’ regulations requiring a voter to have a valid "excuse" to qualify for an absentee ballot (a.k.a. vote by mail).

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