Thanks to some excellent recent presentations by EAC folks, we have today a pleasant surprise of an update to our recent blogs Voting System Decertification: A Way Forward (in Part 1 and Part 2). As you might imagine with a government-run test and certification program, there is an enormous amount of detail (much of it [...]

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Taking a break from news and commentary on election operations issues, I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about current TrustTheVote project efforts that are very relevant to the activities of many election officials right now: tabulating election results, as part of the process of certifying results and finishing the operations for [...]

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NYT reported on the continuing counting in some New York elections, with the control of the NY state house (and hence redistricting) hanging in the balance. The article is mostly apt, but the reference to “hanging chad” is not quite right. FL 2000’s hanging chad drama was mainly about the ridiculous extreme that FL went [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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