An interesting bit today from UC Berkley about a trial of so-called “Risk Limiting Audits”, advocated by Philip Stark. Apparently it went well, well enough that:
“Stark’s technique passed the test and five others, impressing California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, the state’s chief elections officer, and spurring her to sponsor a bill, AB 2023, to [...]

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Following up on John’s discussion of “Internet Voting” in North Carolina…  Let me pick up the thread from the perspective of Vote By Mail as a point of comparison.
I think it’s an interesting comparison because it’s worth asking whether using the Internet makes voting immediately riskier than the model we all know (and some love) [...]

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There is some interesting recent “Internet Voting” news from North Carolina and Georgia. The contrast is in ideal example of different ways of incorporating the Internet into  election technology, sometimes helpful, sometimes not.
From North Carolina, the news is on voting by eMail. This is explicitly permitted by NC law, and my NC colleagues tell me [...]

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I’ve got a word to say about “pilots”. It seems timely given what seems to be a serious uptick in discussion, legislation, and trials of “pilots” of new use of election technology. Actually, the words have already been said, and by people who know much more than I do about it, at the UOCAVA Summit [...]

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Open Source Technology Licensing…
We’ve been promising to respond to the chorus of concerns that we may drift from the standard GPL for our forthcoming elections and voting systems software platform and technology.  Finally, we can begin talking about it (mainly because I found a slice of time to do so, and not because of any [...]

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A couple of days the New York Times Editorial page commented on Voting Technology in an editorial titled “The Voters Will Pay”. Some bits that interested me (but you should read the whole thing):
“[snip...] If the deal is allowed to go through, it would make it harder for jurisdictions to bargain effectively on price [...]

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Tomorrow night starting at 4:30PM the San Francisco Voting Systems Task Force is holding a Public Hearing to intake testimony and public comment on its draft prospective recommendations topics.  [Disclosure: I am a member of this Task Force, appointed by the S.F. City & County Board of Supervisors.]
We encourage everyone who can make it to [...]

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The TrustTheVote Project issued its first formal “Call For Participation” (”CFP”) to its Stakeholder Community last evening, and five elections jurisdiction have already indicated interest.
The CFP is inviting collaboration from elections jurisdictions all over the country who need to determine how to comply with the mandates of the new federal MOVE Act — particularly the [...]

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We’ve been spending a good chunk of our time lately on generating ballots, and on the steps leading up to ballot generation. You might think that the lead-up would be simple — making lists of contests and candidates — but actually there is lots more to it. In fact, it’s been much more time consuming [...]

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Thanks again to David Jefferson for his post yesterday on the lessons for Internet voting of the Google/China news (NYT: In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity). To answer some follow-up questions, I’ll explain a bit about the term vote servers that David referred to.
Let’s start with a little background on Internet voting. Many [...]

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