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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I came across an interesting article about voter registration: “The Alternative to Universal Voter Registration” where John N. Hall strongly supports Automatic Registration (AR) over Universal Voter Registration (UVR).
To people who are not election experts the distinction is a bit subtle. UVR has states proactively try to register everyone to vote, while AR has the [...]

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Thanks again to David Jefferson for his post yesterday on the lessons for Internet voting of the Google/China news (NYT: In Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cybersecurity). To answer some follow-up questions, I’ll explain a bit about the term vote servers that David referred to.
Let’s start with a little background on Internet voting. Many [...]

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[My thanks to to election and tech expert David Jefferson for contributing this excellent, pithy, and though-provoking reflection on the day's top tech/policy news story. -- EJS]

Google recently announced in an important change of policy that it will stop censoring search results for queries coming from China.  That is interesting in its own right, but [...]

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I came across this article, “NIST-certified USB Flash drives with hardware encryption cracked.”. The money quote:
“The real question, however, remains unanswered – how could USB Flash drives that exhibit such a serious security hole be given one of the highest certificates for crypto devices? Even more importantly, perhaps – what is the value of a [...]

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked for public comment on the use of the Internet for election-related activities (among other digital democracy related matters).  They recently published the responses, including those from OSDV.  I’ll let Greg highlight the particularly public-policy-related questions and answers, but I wanted to highlight some aspects of our response that differ [...]

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The reports of computer viruses in NY voting machines — though spurious — cause me to return to a basic mantra of TrustTheVote: we do technology development so that election tech helps inspire public confidence in elections, rather than erode it.
The NY case is a great example of erosion, but also a cautionary tale for [...]

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We now have a federally certified voting system product that has completed the required testing by a federally certified independent test lab. That’s a milestone in itself, as is the public disclosure of some of the results of testing process. Thanks to that disclosure, though, we now know that the test lab did practically zero [...]

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Scanning the news last week, I found rumors of Premier Systems (the voting system vendor formerly known ad Diebold) going open-source, and of the Federal government pondering cases where voting system test results should be confidential. An interesting juxtaposition!
The first item I call a rumor not because I disbelieve the blogger in question, but because [...]

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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 [...]

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