Benlog

So this evening my Facebook account was hacked and spam messages were posted to a few dozen friends on my behalf. Thankfully, since I’m friends with a number of security-savvy folks, I was notified almost instantly. Now I’ve never cared too much about my Facebook account, so I used one of my weak passwords. I’m [...]

So the votes have been cast, the uncertified tally has been released, and the confirmation codes have been published for all voters to check. Now, it’s time to make sure that the coded votes, which were shuffled via the Shuffle Tables into the decoded votes in the Results table, were indeed shuffled and decoded correctly.
Having [...]

I meant to mention this a while ago, but I keep forgetting. Amy Wallace at Wired wrote a fantastic piece on how irrational fears of vaccination are putting us all at risk. The feedback to Ms. Wallace has been enormous, and although tilted towards the positive, the negative feedback from the anti-vaccination crowd is insulting, [...]

Rick Carback from the Scantegrity team just pointed out to me that my totals are not quite the same as theirs, and he surmises that I may have read the Instant Runoff rules incorrectly. Specifically, my code considers that ballots that skip a rank, i.e. that go directly to choice #2 and never indicate a [...]

Coverage of the Takoma Park election continues, with a good article in Wired. And so does the audit!
Some people who showed up on election day couldn’t be verified as registered voters. Thanks to one of the useful HAVA provisions, they got to vote provisionally, meaning their ballot was set aside in an envelope labeled with [...]

[This post is part of my Auditing the Takoma Park Municipal Election series.]
So the votes have been cast, and voters went home. Some of them wrote down their confirmation codes. They probably checked those codes against the official Scantegrity web site. But why would they trust that web site to do all of the math [...]

[This post is part of my Auditing the Takoma Park Municipal Election series.]
OK, so a couple of days ago we verified the initial P table and D tables for all 6 wards in tomorrow’s Takoma Park election. Now comes Meeting 2, which was held a couple of weeks ago to open up a random half [...]

[This post is part of my Auditing the Takoma Park Municipal Election series.]
If you’ve been following, we know what the voter experience is going to be like on Tuesday, and we know what the auditing process is going to be like. So, can we audit this thing already?
Yes, we can. Here are the steps:

Meeting [...]