Andrew Appel: For over 15 years, election security experts and election integrity advocates have been communicating to their state and local election officials the dangers of touch-screen voting machines. The danger is simple: if fraudulent software is installed in the … Continue reading
Category Archives: voting technology
Politico: The foreign cyberattacks that so many intelligence officials feared didn’t upend the 2020 elections — but this year’s contests nonetheless showed how much the nation still needs to do to fix its security weaknesses.Paper trails protected the integrity of … Continue reading
Important analysis from the Brennan Center. … Continue reading
Detroit News: An audit of Antrim County election results Thursday gave President Donald Trump a net gain of 12 votes from the certified results in the northern Michigan county. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s total decreased by one vote, from 5,960 to … Continue reading
Business Insider: The election software company Smartmatic is demanding retractions from right-wing media outlets, accusing them of spreading conspiracy theories about its role in the 2020 elections.In a letter obtained by Insider, Smartmatic accused Fox News of engaging in “a concerted … Continue reading
A reader passes along the following, which I have not had a chance to independently verify. Happy to hear any corrections or additions: Background:As you know, President Trump’s former attorney Sidney Powell filed her so-called “Kraken” lawsuits in district courts … Continue reading
Josh Gerstein for Politico: A judge assigned to a Republican-led lawsuit alleging widespread fraud in the presidential election in Georgia issued an order late Sunday night blocking plans to wipe or reset voting machines used in three counties in the … Continue reading
NYT ran this the other day, and worth linking now in light of the President raising these debunked claims on twitter. … Continue reading
Kim Zetter for Politico: Stein’s experience is far from unique: Time and again, people seeking answers about perplexing results or election anomalies encounter obstacles. Often the only examination occurs if parties or candidates request a recount — which means voters … Continue reading
You can find the order (without any stated reasons) at this link. Here is my October 11 coverage of the district court’s order. … Continue reading
By Richard L. Hasen The latest murky revelations from U.S. intelligence officials that Russian government operatives are probing state voter registration databases as they did in 2016 raises the question: is this all they’ve got? Why aren’t the Russians doing … Continue reading
NYT: Microsoft and a team of companies and law enforcement groups have disabled — at least temporarily — one of the world’s largest hacking operations, an effort run by Russian-speaking cybercriminals that officials feared could disrupt the presidential election in … Continue reading
WaPo: A federal judge could rule as early as today in a legal fight that might upend how Georgia runs November’s election. The dispute centers on a last-minute software update that Georgia officials ordered on voting machines across the state. The … Continue reading
Philly Inquirer: A laptop and several memory sticks used to program Philadelphia’s voting machines were stolen from a city warehouse in East Falls, officials confirmed Wednesday, setting off a scramble to investigate and to ensure the machines had not been … Continue reading
AJC: Georgia election officials said Saturday they found a programming error on the state’s voting touchscreens that caused a row of candidates in the 21-person U.S. Senate special election to disappear at times when flipping back and forth between screens.The problem will … Continue reading
Kim Zetter for Politico: Growing numbers of elections offices across the U.S. are using electronic devices to sign voters in at the polls — a shift that has occurred with little scrutiny despite a host of security questions and a … Continue reading
Kim Zetter for Politico: The federal Election Assistance Commission has rebuked the nation’s top voting-machine maker over marketing materials that the panel says deceptively implied the company’s voting machines are EAC-certified.The commission admonished Election Systems & Software over promotional literature … Continue reading
WSJ: Election Systems & Software LLC, the top U.S. seller of voting-machine technology, is calling a truce in its feud with computer-security researchers over the ways they probe for vulnerabilities of the company’s systems.With the U.S. presidential election less than … Continue reading
WaPo on DNC convention plan. … Continue reading
Sue Halpern in the New Yorker. … Continue reading
Andrew W. Appel, Richard A. DeMillo, and Philip B. Stark with a new article in ELJ. Here is the abstract: The complexity of U.S. elections usually requires computers to count ballots—but computers can be hacked, so election integrity requires a voting system … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
NPR: The federal government is letting states know it considers online voting to be a “high-risk” way of running elections even if all recommended security protocols are followed.It’s the latest development in the debate over Internet voting as a few states have … Continue reading
The Washington Post reports. … Continue reading
Release: Today, voting rights advocates filed a lawsuit in Wake County Superior Court challenging the new electronic voting system that Mecklenburg County and several other North Carolina counties rushed to implement for the 2020 elections. The suit alleges the new system … Continue reading
Not good. … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
WaPo: Americans should not be confident about the security of the 2020 election, according to a slim majority of experts surveyed by The Cybersecurity 202.The assessment from 57 percent of The Network, a panel of more than 100 cybersecurity experts who … Continue reading
AP on the controversy over BMDs. … Continue reading
CNET reports. … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
Well-timed conference at Georgetown Friday that I unfortunately was unable to attend. It looks very important. … Continue reading
Steven Rosenfeld explains. … Continue reading
AJC: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has repeatedly said paper ballots will give Georgia voters “a physical recount.” But under a proposed elections rule, the only physical part of the recount would occur when poll workers feed ballots into the … Continue reading
Details. … Continue reading
AP reports. … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
You can find the emergency petition here. Particularly concerning are the allegations in sections 22-23 of the complaint: … Continue reading
Seattle Times editorial: The ubiquity of online life comes with devastating vulnerabilities. Even one of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, is reportedly not safe from hackers of electronic devices.Despite this well-established risk, Washington elections officials are moving in disjointed directions about … Continue reading
So far, most of the coverage of BMDs (voting machines in which voters cast their votes on a touchscreen, the machine spits out a ballot listing the voter’s choices and produces a bar code/QR code for a ballot reading machine … Continue reading
Andy Kroll for Mother Jones: Are we prepared going into the 2020 election? After seven months of reporting, interviewing more than 40 experts as well as current and former government officials and reviewing thousands of pages of records, the reality … Continue reading
AP reports. … Continue reading
NPR: Iowa’s Democratic Party plans to use a new Internet-connected smartphone app to help calculate and transmit results during the state’s caucuses next month, Iowa Public Radio and NPR have confirmed.Party leaders say they decided to opt for that strategy … Continue reading
NBC: [A] team of election security experts say that last summer, they discovered some systems are, in fact, online.“We found over 35 [voting systems] had been left online and we’re still continuing to find more,” Kevin Skoglund, a senior technical … Continue reading
Bloomberg Law: The infiltration by foreign countries like China into election voting equipment is emerging as a growing concern among vendors, who are actually asking for more federal regulation as they grapple with a lack of domestic suppliers producing critical … Continue reading
Going on now before the House Administration Committee, with testimony from the CEOs of the three largest voting equipment vendors. Expect a grilling. … Continue reading
WaPo on a study by Alex Halderman and other researchers at the University of Michigan. Here’s the abstract of the paper: Ballot marking devices (BMDs) allow voters to select candidates on a computer kiosk, which prints a paper ballot that … Continue reading
Election issues lead the WaPo’s “Cybersecurity 202” daily roundup today. … Continue reading
This Thursday, Congress will hear from three top experts, and three of the primary manufacturers (ES&S, Hart InterCivic, and Dominion Voting Systems), of voting systems. This is apparently the first time the top executives of all three companies have testified … Continue reading
The Savannah Morning News previews what it calls the “largest purchase of new machines in history.” … Continue reading