Gregory Miller of the OSDV Foundation will be provide testimony during State of California Hearings on Future of Elections Systems next Monday, February 8th.
CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen requested elections and voting systems experts from around the country to attend and testify, and answer questions about the current election administration landscape and how California [...]

Read Full Post »

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, [...]

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

I’d like to call your attention to this week’s electile dysfunction news, which is about a mini-Minnesota situation in Fairfax County, Virginia. I think it’s instructive because it illustrates how some problems with "paperless" voting are actually quite similar to a more old-fashioned form of voting, "paper only" voting, and a mooted new-fangled kind of voting, Internet voting.

Read Full Post »

As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the many
events of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d
pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the
election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products
that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s
potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my
claims.

Read Full Post »

Here is a first-ever admission: a real software bug in a real voting system can drop real votes, and has dropped votes. And perhaps has been doing so for years. I wrote earlier about the wrangle between the state of Ohio and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), in which some real vote dropping was blamed on anti-virus software (which wasn’t allowed to be in the machines in the first place!).

Read Full Post »

Confidence - or maybe it’s about lack thereof, if you look at from the point of view of commentator Rady Ananda. While she produced another nicely compiled report today in OpEdNews.Com on several states that have conducted additional detailed studies of the security involved in software-driven election systems, she did little to inst

Read Full Post »