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 Voting System Technology on Oct 15th, 2009
Kudos to Brad Friedman for making a good call on a subtle point in his comment on my posting about Bo Lipari’s coverage of the NY State testing of voting systems. Brad objects to my statement that lever machines are not compliant with the Help Amercia Vote Act (HAVA).
And rightly so! The bad news about [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Oct 9th, 2009
Another in our series of real life stories … how it actually works for real election officials to test a new voting system that they might be adopting for use in the state.
The backplot is that New York State has been unwilling to give up its admittedly no-longer-legal* lever machines, until the the state Board [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 14th, 2009
Recently I’ve made a series of posts seemingly obsessed with chanting “audit, audit, …” mantra-like, to put readers into a trance. For those of you still awake enough to want to know how to find out whether election results were garbled by the computers used to create them, today we have some more answers. The [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 8th, 2009
In a previous post I described the Minnesota election process recipe and later described some room for improvement — well, now you can read it straight from MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, what he’d like to do to improve the recipe.
Those improvements are mainly in election process and practice. I’d like to [...]
Posted in Election Adminstration Technology, Voting System Technology on Jul 3rd, 2009
In yesterday’s and other postings, I praised election officials in Minnesota, and said that election officials nationwide can learn a lot from how Minnesota conducts elections, including but not limited to audit and recount. Today I’d like to point out some improvements to the MN recipe, starting from the root cause of the need for [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 2nd, 2009
The legal disputes are finally finished in the Coleman-Franken Senate election in Minnesota, with the ruling by the MN Supreme Court. Though it was a torturous path, we can say today that the recount and following resolution was a success — and ask what the recipe for success was, and whether it is a [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on May 7th, 2009
Continuing the story of accessible voting and the "we just build stuff" mantra of the TrustTheVote project, I have an example of a serious mis-understanding that can easily arise because of the jargon and procedural confusion I wrote about earlier.
Posted in Voting System Technology on May 6th, 2009
Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we’re building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion — so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don’t work elsewhere.
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