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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I got a great and deceptively simple question recently: what guidelines should be used for testing of voting machines?

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It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today’s devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?

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Oregon is one of several states that this month have legislative activity that’s starting to look at the phrase "Internet voting". Wired Oregon reports on Attempts to Bring Elections into Digital Age as a pair of bills, one for online voting, and one for online voter registration. But the reference to the recent report on the Pew Center on the States is a bit misleading.

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