Building the People’s Voting System

Gold or Pyrite?

In a couple of prior posts, I explained the “gold copy” or “trusted build” concept, and the role of EAC, NIST, and test labs. I can’t seem to completely bury this tale, because it raised another question about the processing of checking a voting system to see if it is legit: “Why is this checking … 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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NYT Letters: Searching for a Reliable Voting System

I can’t resist calling your attention to some very thoughtful letters to the editor of the New York Times, on the topic of voting technology. For starters, the NYT had very straightforward editorial with trust as the keyword How to Trust Electronic Voting that started with the opinion that “Electronic voting machines that do not … Continued

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Introducing the TrustTheVote Project and Blog

Our thanks go to our patient readers of the Open Source Digital Voting blog, for a bit of radio silence while we’ve been standing up the TrustTheVote project, and infrastructure for it such as a blog, wiki, source code repository, and project tracker. What is the TrustTheVote project? In brief, it is all the technology … Continued

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Tech Improvements to Good Election Recipes

In a previous post I described the Minnesota election process recipe and later described some room for improvement — well, now you can read it straight from MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, what he’d like to do to improve the recipe. Those improvements are mainly in election process and practice. I’d like to stir … Continued

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Improving on the Minnesota Recipe

In yesterday‘s and other postings, I praised election officials in Minnesota, and said that election officials nationwide can learn a lot from how Minnesota conducts elections, including but not limited to audit and recount. Today I’d like to point out some improvements to the MN recipe, starting from the root cause of the need for … Continued

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RSA Conference Panel: Lessons Learned from 2008 Election Technology

I spoke in a panel at the RSA Conference yesterday, on the topic of lessons learned in 2008 about voting technology. I thought I’d use this blog to share my remarks, but even though we each spoke for only 5 minutes before the question and answer period, I covered three areas of lessons learned; so I’ll cover them in separate blog posts on each topic of (1) Usability lessons (2) Audit lessons (3) Transparency lessons.

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More Humbolt Election Tech Weirdness: Premier Huffs

Well, I am sorry to say that I have to make an exception to my avoidance of casting voting system vendors in a bad light — in this case Premier Systems (formerly Diebold). I was rather proud of PS(fD) when they owned up to the "ballot dropping" software problem (paper ballots scanned and apparently counted, but the first few not actually counted, and no log record of the deletion) that was discovered in the post-election audit conducted in Humboldt County by registrar Read More

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