Benlog

Bruce Schneier is generally right on when it comes to security, and his explanations are usually extremely crisp and to the point. Plus, it’s hard to argue with a man whose online reputation precedes him. That said, when it comes to voting, I’m a little worried by some of Bruce’s latest posts. On November 13th, [...]

Salon talks about the undervote situation in Sarasota. In their “featured letters,” one reader, self-nicknamed “the voice of reason,” says:

If we need to use computers to vote, why can’t there be a double receipt system? One receipt goes into the ballot box, voter gets to keep the other as a record of his vote. If [...]

This past Tuesday, I was the election warden, aka the Chief, for a Boston precinct. I didn’t announce it ahead of time, because I wanted the realistic experience of an average warden, in an average precinct. I put my knowledge of computer science and crypto aside, went to the mandated 2 hours of new-warden training, read the manual over and over and over again over the weekend, and managed the precinct as best and as cleanly as I could. It was, in a word, a fantastic experience.

Scratch & Vote is in the press thanks to Peter Weiss of Science News, who gives a very good overview of election technology issues. I’ve also posted the slides and latest paper for this work, which is joint with Ronald Rivest.
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David Chaum and his team have just released Punchscan v1, the first open-source implementation of a truly verifiable voting system. Like other voting systems in its class (there aren’t that many), it allows for truly open auditing and voter verification. And it’s extremely misunderstood. The Slashdot thread is way off the mark, so I thought [...]

Election season is in full force. The TV programs, the newspapers, and a whole bunch of smart folks are telling you that voting machines are broken, that they won’t count your vote, that democracy can be hacked (thanks, HBO.) No doubt there are serious security issues with today’s voting machines. All of them, with or [...]