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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Seems to me that I’ve seen more interesting videos, alarming articles, and research studies of problems with e-voting than with old-fashioned hand-count paper ballot elections. We hear about many ways and reasons to doubt election results that use machines in some part of the process, and about how “all manual count” elections are the “gold [...]

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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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[Today's guest post is from election technology expert Doug Jones, who is now revealed as also being an encyclopedia of U.S. elections history. Doug's remarks below were in a discussion about how to effectively use post-election ballot-count audits as a means to gain trust in the correct operation of voting machines -- particularly timely, given [...]

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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 [...]

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New York state recently certified two voting systems, and the end of the process is an interesting insight into current certification and standards — particularly the view of the dissent-voting participant, Bo Lipari, who explained his vote in his blog My Vote on NY Voting Machine Certification. It’s certainly worth reading Bo’s complete rationale, but [...]

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Thanks to erstwhile election texpert Dan Wallach for bring attention to the burglary of an early voting center in Houston, and to the Houston Chronicle’s Chris Moran for coverage of the story including good quotes from Dan! But I have to add that in addition to theft of computers containing voter records, there were also [...]

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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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