In my last post, I recounted an incident from Erie County NY, but deferred to today an account of what the technology troubles were, that prevented the routine use of a Tabulator to create county-wide vote totals by combining count data from each of the opscan paper ballot counting devices. The details are worth considering [...]

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Behind the election news in Buffalo, NY, there is a cautionary tale about voting system complexity and confidence. The story is about a very close race for the state Senate’s 60th district. One news article includes a reference to “software problems with the new electronic voting machines in Erie County.”
The fundamental issue here is [...]

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Continuing on with our recap of election technology faults and oddities in the recent election, not the most alarming but perhaps the most perplexing is a story from Gadsden, AL. From the the news article, it seems that Etowah County’s election officials rely on their voting system vendor, Election Systems and Services (ES&S) to provide [...]

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NYT reported on the continuing counting in some New York elections, with the control of the NY state house (and hence redistricting) hanging in the balance. The article is mostly apt, but the reference to “hanging chad” is not quite right. FL 2000’s hanging chad drama was mainly about the ridiculous extreme that FL went [...]

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Here is some interesting news from Spokane WA, where ballot counting has been seriously delayed because election officials are hand copying tens of thousands of ballots. It’s an interesting lesson in how vote-by-mail (Spokane is an all-VBM county in WA) creates higher operational requirements for accountability, transparency, and election integrity.
Some readers may not be familiar [...]

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It should come as no surprise that this month’s election activities included claims of voting machine malfunction and related investigation and litigation. In many parts of the U.S., the voting systems used this month are the same flakey systems that in the past have created controversy and legal wrangling. (I promise to define “flakey”.)
But are [...]

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We’ve been answering lots of questions about the OSDV Foundation’s role in the District of Columbia’s Pilot “digital vote-by-mail” project, including a recent post with a detailed account of the history leading up to the Pilot.  But there is one Q&A in particular that I want to share with a broader audience. It’s a two-part [...]

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Kudos to the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro for his article “D.C. launches test of open-source online voting” — fine coverage, but with a title that I disagree with in terminology only. I don’t view the D.C. pilot as “online voting” but rather as a test of an additional form of digital transport for return of [...]

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We’re pleased to echo the announcement by the District of Columbia’s Board of Election and Ethics (BOEE) that they will adopt TrustTheVote technology as part of a pilot project to support the delivery and return of overseas ballots. In Washington D.C.’s September primary election, open-source technology from the TrustTheVote Project will be used [...]

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(Part 2 of 2: What’s My Ballot?)
Today, I’m continuing on from a recent post, which compared my in-person voting experience with one method of Internet-based voting: return of marked ballots by fax or email. Next up is a similar comparison with another form of Internet-based voting: Internet voting from home using a PC’s Web browser.
Let’s [...]

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