Building the People’s Voting System

Tag: voting devices

TrustTheVote on HuffPost

We’ll be live on HuffPost online today at 8pm eastern: @HuffPostLive http://huff.lv/Uhokgr or live.huffingtonpost.com and I thought we should share our talking points for the question: How do you compare old-school paper ballots vs. e-voting? I thought the answers would be particularly relevant to today’s NYT editorial on the election which concluded with this quote: … Continued

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More Twisted Logic: How Voting Machines Eat Pretzels

In a recent posting, I tried to give a flavor of the pretzel logic that derives from the crazy quilt of state-specific rules for counting ballots — with a particularly notorious case from straight-party voting. The next question is, given this crazy quilt, what is a voting system supposed to do? Before answering that today, … Continued

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Five Ways to Call a Voting Machine a …

Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we’re building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion — so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don’t work elsewhere.

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Mini-Minnesota in Virginia

I’d like to call your attention to this week’s electile dysfunction news, which is about a mini-Minnesota situation in Fairfax County, Virginia. I think it’s instructive because it illustrates how some problems with "paperless" voting are actually quite similar to a more old-fashioned form of voting, "paper only" voting, and a mooted new-fangled kind of voting, Internet voting.

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The Machineries of Democracy: Failed Trust, Elections in Courts

As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the many
events of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d
pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the
election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products
that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s
potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my
claims.

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A first: election system vendors admits losing votes

Here is a first-ever admission: a real software bug in a real voting system can drop real votes, and has dropped votes. And perhaps has been doing so for years. I wrote earlier about the wrangle between the state of Ohio and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), in which some real vote dropping was blamed on anti-virus software (which wasn’t allowed to be in the machines in the first place!).

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