Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 23rd, 2009
I wrote before that this month’s re-count activity in Pennsylvania was notable because of the variety of voting methods used there, and hence the variety of recounting methods needed. In contrast to the Lackawanna county that I mentioned specifically, there are many counties in PA that use completely paperless DRE voting machines. In these cases, [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Nov 18th, 2009
Pennsylvania has ordered a statewide recount of the race for Pennsylvania Superior Court Judge – a recount that is similar in scope and significance as the Minnesota Franken/Coleman recount (though one hopes less acrimonious), as the result will decide who will be making durable rulings in law for the whole state.
It’s an interesting story, for [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 30th, 2009
I’m hearing lots of fascinating stuff at the NIST Common Data Format Workshop, but a couple of items really struck me this morning: the contrast between a presentation by a voting system vendor, and a developer of an open source balloting device prototype. Neither of them explicitly asked a very good question about central or [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 30th, 2009
I thought I’d share a comment and response I got about trusting software to count votes. The comment was a very sensible one, though a mis-perception: that TTV is suggesting that software should be trust to count vote correctly. Not so! Here is the true but less simple story.
Many election officials want to conduct elections [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Voting System Technology on Oct 19th, 2009
One of the main goals of the TrustTheVote Project is to increase voter confidence in election results, by the use of election technology that is substantially more trustworthy and transparent than similar technology in use today. One of the main reasons for the importance of this mission is the experience of some high profile close [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Voting System Technology on Aug 20th, 2009
Some readers may sigh relief at the news that today’s post is the last (for a while at least!) in a series about the use of vote-count auditing methods to detect a situation in which an election result was garbled by the computers used to create them. Today, a little reality check on the use [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 17th, 2009
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, [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 12th, 2009
A good question re-surfaced for us as we participated in the National Civic Summit recently. The issue was and remains about identifying a “gold build,” that is, when there is a particular system/version that is certified for use as a voting system, how should election officials know that the systems that they deployed are systems [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 7th, 2009
Today I’m going to give a flavor of the pretzel logic that applies to the way ballots are counted in the U.S. An alternative title for this post might be “Welcome to the real world of Federal Democracy” because several states have their own different pretzel. You can have 2 marked ballots, each in a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 18th, 2008
ABC News and Facebook are running one of their daily (sometimes hourly) political polls this morning with this question: Is the plan for Michigan Democrats to re-run their primary on June 3 a good idea?
So far its running about 53% to 41% against the idea.
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