Benlog

I was speaking with a colleague yesterday about Loopt, the location-based social network, the rise of location-based services and the incredible privacy challenges they present. I heard the Loopt folks give a talk a few months ago, and I was generally impressed with the measures they’re taking to protect their users’ data.
I particularly enjoyed the [...]

Bruce Schneier writes that it’s reasonable for unmanned drones to broadcast unencrypted video streams, because

the video stream is not that useful to enemies, and
given that many people need access to the video feed, the key distribution problem would be very difficult to manage, and some allies could be severely handicapped if they happened [...]

Well, it’s been a few weeks of craziness at home and catching up on other work, but I’ve finally wrapped up the Takoma Park 2009 audit. The final step: letting you, dear reader, run the audit all on your own.
You’ll find the complete instructions here on the auditing site.
I haven’t tested this on Windows, just [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

[This post is part of my Auditing the Takoma Park Municipal Election series.]
We’ll now consider the auditing portion of the Takoma Park election. This is a little bit involved, so we’ll take our time. Importantly, the typical voter does not need to burden themselves with this complexity. All that Valerie, our voter, needs to do, [...]