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
Category Archives: voting technology
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
This Bloomberg piece on Web-connected election machines scapegoats the public craving for instant results. “The pressure to promptly transmit results to news organizations –- and ultimately voters — is so great that election officials have no choice but to briefly … Continue reading
The Guardian reports. Cybersecurity is exceedingly important. And now your reminder that at least in the past, we have been more prone to hacking than the voting systems. … Continue reading
Semiconductor Engineering reports on some of the challenges confronting manufacturers of secure accessible voting systems, and some of the industry efforts to meet those challenges. That’s right, Semiconductor Engineering. You’re welcome. … Continue reading
With lots of election security concerns in the air, a problem in 2016 with electronic pollbooks in Durham County generated a fair amount of attention. At the time, it didn’t look like a malicious incursion, but that didn’t stop speculation, … Continue reading
Dauphin County is the last over the line to purchase a new voting system with a paper trail, right at the deadline. … Continue reading
WaPo: Last month, voters in six Georgia counties cast ballots for local elections using new touch-screen voting machines that officials have said will resolve long-standing questions about the security of the state’s election system.Richard DeMillo, a professor of computing at the … Continue reading
Carolina Public Press reports. … Continue reading
Press release. … Continue reading
The Hill: The spending deal agreed upon by House and Senate negotiators includes $425 million for states to improve their election security, two congressional source confirmed to The Hill on Monday.According to the sources, the appropriations deal, set to be … Continue reading
Free Speech for People: Free Speech For People has filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania state court challenging the use of the insecure, unreliable ExpressVote XL voting machines. The lawsuit, filed against Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar with the pro … Continue reading
Fast Company: Amid heightened concerns about the integrity of the voting process in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, two election security experts recently quit Verified Voting, a respected election accountability group, in protest. They claim that it has been … Continue reading
Carolina Public Press: A voting system certified and tested earlier this year for use in North Carolina’s March 2020 primaries won’t be available, according to manufacturer Elections Systems and Software, so the company’s lobbyists have suggested the state quickly approve … Continue reading
WaPo reports. … Continue reading
NYT: It was a few minutes after the polls closed here on Election Day when panic began to spread through the county election offices.Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out … Continue reading
WaPo: The federal government should start vetting companies that sell election systems as seriously as it does defense contractors and energy firms, a top election security group argues in a proposal out this morning.Under the proposal from New York University’s Brennan Center … Continue reading
Bloomberg: Digital voting machines were promoted in the wake of a similarly chaotic scene 19 years ago: the infamous punch-card ballots and hanging chads of south Florida that tossed the presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore into … Continue reading
WaPo: County election websites in two battleground states are highly vulnerable to hacking by Russia or another adversary that might seek to disrupt the 2020 vote by misleading voters about polling locations or spreading other false information. About 55 percent of county … Continue reading