I just finished voting in CA’s primary — whew! 47 contests, 76 candidates total, and for on-paper voters, 4 sheets! But today, instead of hand-marking a ballot (my preference explained in an earlier posting), I used a DRE. This voting machine is part of the voting system that San Mateo County purchased from Hart Systems, [...]

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I have to admit, I like paper ballots. But it wasn’t always that way. As a small child, I remember going into the voting booth with a parent, and watching them use those fine old lever machines. They were cool. The curtain made it seem like something both secret and important was happening. The little [...]

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Last Friday was a busy day for the Federal Elections Assistance Commission.  They issued their Report to Congress on efforts to establish guidelines for remote voting systems.  And they closed their comment period at 4:00pm for the public to submit feedback on their draft Pilot Program Testing Requirements.
This is being driven by the MOVE Act [...]

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I was very encouraged by recent election news from Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper: Reason for election machine glitch found, officials expect things to be OK for the primary. At first blush, it might seem like bad news:
All told, 89 of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections‘  1,200 machines powered [...]

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[Today's guest post is from election technology expert Doug Jones, who is now revealed as also being an encyclopedia of U.S. elections history. Doug's remarks below were in a discussion about how to effectively use post-election ballot-count audits as a means to gain trust in the correct operation of voting machines -- particularly timely, given [...]

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The other day I gave a talk at the Boston Bar Camp 2010 about the work we are doing at TrustTheVote. Over the year or so I’ve been involved I’ve collected some good stories and surprising anecdotes about how elections work and don’t work in the US.
After the talk a fellow came over to [...]

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Some of the feedback on my internet/email voting post can be summed up this way:
Is email voting really that bad? Sure, emailed ballots can be snooped, tampered, or diverted en route, but so can paper vote-by-mail ballots – yet we still use them. So what, specifically, is so much worse about emailed ballots?
First off, I [...]

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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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