Posted in Commentary, Election Technology Reform, Voting System Technology on Feb 16th, 2010
Tomorrow night starting at 4:30PM the San Francisco Voting Systems Task Force is holding a Public Hearing to intake testimony and public comment on its draft prospective recommendations topics. [Disclosure: I am a member of this Task Force, appointed by the S.F. City & County Board of Supervisors.]
We encourage everyone who can make it to [...]
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 27th, 2009
Sequoia Voting Systems announced today that they will be moving towards a disclosed-source model in which they will soon begin publishing their source code.
I must say that the tone and language of the press release is gratifying, especially that they thought to say that the product is also open-data, which is critical for the goal [...]
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 Sep 21st, 2009
This past week I was privileged to be invited to an engaging and very informative event hosted by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project on Caltech’s Pasadena campus. Turns out that L.A. County is in the early stages of figuring out “where to from here” for their next generation elections systems technology, and this event was [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Sep 10th, 2009
It looks like the largest U.S. voting system company will acquire the second-largest, creating a potential monopolist controlling about three quarters of the market nationally, and 100% in some regions. I could explain why that might seem like a bad idea to many people, but the New York Times’ The Business of Voting Machines already [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 11th, 2009
That’s a catchy blog headline, I hope, or at least an important issue. But I’ve fooled you because while answering the question, I am going to discuss “audit” again. I wrote earlier that one kind of audit is performed by election officials to detect errors in voting machines, or to put it another way, to [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Aug 7th, 2009
Today I’m going to give a flavor of the pretzel logic that applies to the way ballots are counted in the U.S. An alternative title for this post might be “Welcome to the real world of Federal Democracy” because several states have their own different pretzel. You can have 2 marked ballots, each in a [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 30th, 2009
Here are a couple interesting news tidbits to ponder today, showing the breadth and depth of openness to changes to current U.S. voting methods.
First, some news from the EAC, the part of the Federal government that runs the program for Federal certification of voting systems — certification that in many states is effectively a pre-requesite [...]
Posted in Voting System Technology on Jul 23rd, 2009
There’s a fascinating nugget inside of a fine legal story unfolding in Arizona. I know that not all our readers are thrilled by news of court cases related to election law and election technology, so I’ll summarize the legal story in brief, and then get to the nugget. The Arizona Court of Appeals has [...]
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