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 [...]

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We’re certainly seeing a “holiday rush” from Bob Carey and crew at the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which provides voting assistance to military and overseas voters. Following the announcement that I wrote about recently, we now hear that the DoD has agreed to make a major contribution to military voter enfranchisement – details at nytimes.com [...]

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There is some very interesting news today out of the U.S. government organization, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, which provides voting assistance to military and overseas voters. FVAP announced their intent to embark on a path to the creation of software tools to help voters abroad with obtaining ballots, specifically:
FVAP Director Bob Carey recently announced [...]

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I resisted rushing to the keyboard to post  something about  Senator Edward Kennedy Tuesday evening, preferring to simply absorb the loss.  Having been through a string of family losses myself years ago, I knew well what the remaining members of the Kennedy family surely must have felt.

As a child I recall my Father coming home [...]

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Ok, so rumors of my being radio silent for months due to my feeble attempts to restore my software development skills are greatly unbounded.  I’ve been crazy busy with outreach to States’ elections officials, as our design and specification work is driven by their domain expertise.   In the midst of that, I received a question/comment [...]

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The legal disputes are finally finished in the Coleman-Franken Senate election in Minnesota, with the ruling by the MN Supreme Court. Though it was a torturous path, we can say today that the recount and following resolution was a success — and ask what the recipe for success was, and whether it is a [...]

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I’d like to set the record straight on Minnesota’s handling of their November 2008 close election for U.S. Senate. It’s not a debacle, it’s a miracle. And it’s no longer a recount, it’s a series of court cases.

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I have to confess to being appalled by the number of times recently that I have heard people talk about potential benefits of "security by obscurity" for voting systems. It’s one of those bad old ideas that just won’t die: if you hide the inner workings (source code) of a complex device (a voting system), that makes it harder for an adversary to break (hack, steal elections).

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The recent New York Times editorial "Still Broken" is well worth the read, especially for its significant focus on dysfunction in the voter registration systems — something that often gets second billing to recollections of hanging chad and recent vote-dropping voting machine stories.

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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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