Benlog

I’m at EVT 2007, the USENIX/ACCURATE workshop on voting technology. I had to miss the first session because I flew in on the red-eye, so I missed three talks that described attacks on Nedap, Diebold, and Hart. I hear they were quite interesting.
Design I
The second session (the first I attended), started with Rice University’s “Casting [...]

In 2004, I appeared on a panel at Harvard alongside Debra Bowen, who was then a California State Senator. I found her to be extremely sharp, and particularly insightful about voting issues at a time when most of the public debate was thoroughly confused (it’s gotten a little bit better since).
Ms. Bowen has since become [...]

The No-Vote-By-Mail blog cites me again, and in so doing points me to a a note by King County in Washington about how they are ensuring that vote-by-mail preserves ballot secrecy.
Okay, let’s say I believe everything they say. The ballot is double-enveloped, there are no traces of who the voter is on the ballot, there [...]

It’s interesting how Voting often comes up in so many discussions, and how often folks believe that Voting is a well established, stable process that is usually fair, except for those pesky touchscreen voting machines that are corrupting a process that has long been well managed. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like unverified touchscreen [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy just won the French Presidential Elections by a sizeable margin. In case my fellow US liberals are worried about a “Conservative” victory in Europe, it’s important to note that the US Republican Party and the French UMP are by no means the same. Sarkozy used his first speaking opportunity to declare France “a [...]

Last Friday, Professor David King presented the results of his review of the Boston Election Department at a meeting of the MIT Voting Technology Project. His work has been mentioned in the press, but this is the first time that David has been able to publicly comment on his recommendations.
There are number of interesting changes [...]

There isn’t much hard data on the coercion issues of vote by mail, though with states adopting new absentee voting policies, that may change, and we may start to see some interesting things. In the meantime, there’s a very interesting collection of vote-by-mail fraud incidents reported regularly on the No Vote By Mail blog. I [...]

In response to my recent post regarding open-audit voting, Ronald Crane expresses a number of doubts regarding cryptographic auditing of elections, concluding “I don’t see that crypto voting solves much.” I am responding in detail here because Ronald is deeply misinformed. There are certainly points regarding open-audit techniques that merit in-depth discussion, but the points [...]

First, I need to express solidarity with Avi, who went out on a limb and professed his love of American Idol. I, too, am a closet American Idol fan, and I completely agree: if only the voting were verifiable! I personally think Jared should have qualified for the final 12.
But on to the immediate issues, [...]

Professors Avi Rubin and Ed Felten are renowned computer security experts. Their work has made the press numerous times, and they’ve testified to various Congressional Committees on many issues, including voting. But when it comes to voting, their statements tend to leave out an entire category of voting systems for no clear reason. It’s as [...]