Benlog

Ed Felten, who’s done some fantastic work on DRM and steganography, is writing more and more about voting systems. It’s great to see the community growing, but it’s also important to keep the academic debate alive. In that spirit, here goes some (hopefully constructive) criticism of Felten’s posts.
In Paper Trail Standard Advances, Felten writes:

On Tuesday, [...]

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was sent to Syria by the US government, where he was tortured for months. He was never allowed to speak to a lawyer. He was never charged with any crime. Thankfully, his single phone call enabled his wife to discover what had happened to him and start [...]

As one astute commenter notes in my previous blog post on the TGDC meeting, a second resolution presented again by Ron Rivest today was accepted, thanks to revisions that grandfathered in existing machines. This is not quite as good as yesterday’s resolution, but it’s still quite good. So I must at the very least take [...]

I spent a good chunk of November in Northern California, where I gave four talks on voting with different levels of cryptographic depth based on audience interest: SRI, Google, Berkeley, and Stanford. Thanks to my respective hosts at all of these places! I’ve posted all of my slides, as always under a Creative Commons license [...]

Yesterday, the Technical Guidelines Development Committee narrowly rejected Ron Rivest’s proposal that voting systems become software-independent. This is a real shame, and it should lead us to seriously question the qualifications and biases of those who voted against it.
The software-independence guideline means that a voting system can’t depend on software for its correctness. In other [...]

The election is behind us, so let’s talk about the reports that came out just before the election. On October 30th, UConn released a report on weaknesses in the Diebold Accuvote Optical Scan.
I have a beef with the timing of the release of UConn’s voting report: one week before the election. This is no way [...]