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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[Today I want to share some eloquent writing about the right to a secret ballot. Though Doug Jones' October 2008 remarks are about an issue that arose a couple years ago, his words remain extremely relevant, especially in the context of the current discussion of e-mail voting. The discussion with Doug started with an issue [...]

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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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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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I have arrived in Munich, reached my hotel and actually caught a nap.  It was a sloppy slushy day here from what I can tell; about 30 degrees and some wet snow; but spring is around the corner.  On the flight over the Pole last evening (I’m a horrible plane sleeper) I worked on final [...]

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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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I’d like to thank Eric Rescorla for making an excellent and pithy point about the purpose of publishing images of  marked ballots.  But first, thanks (again) to Mitch Trachtenberg of the Humboldt Transparency Project for publishing a hand-picked set of ballot images that provide a great example of the difficult borderline cases of interpreting hard-marked [...]

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In the next step on the topic of voting machines and transparency, let me explain what I meant in a previous posting about a “side effect” of adoption of TTV technology for machine counts of optically scanned ballots. The ballot counting software, like pretty much all we make, logs the heck out of everything, and [...]

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Today I provide the next step in clarifying TTV goals in relation to discussions with election transparency advocates. Regarding the previous posting, I want to emphasize that voting  machines — in this case we focus on paper ballot scanning machines — are a transparency problem, if there is no human involvement in counting paper ballots, [...]

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The Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act is probably not high on your radar screen of activities in the U.S. Congress — but it is important to me, for two reasons, aside from the most basic one that it enables broader access for overseas voters.

The bill avoided partisan politics that usually sidelines any election [...]

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