Benlog

… the New York Times publishes a huge story on voting machines. To their credit, this is one of the best pieces I’ve seen to date, assuming you accept that these major publications simply refuse to talk about open-audit voting.
Some great lines that mirror what I’ve said in my own talks:

Part of the problem stems [...]

Just before Christmas, I was invited by my friend and colleague Steve Weis to give a talk about voting with cryptography at Google. I’ve done about 10-15 talks of this kind, but this was a fun challenge: a very talented audience with an introductory understanding of cryptography (Steve had given 3 prior lectures on cryptography). [...]

Vote By Mail in California

While we’re struggling to secure voting machines, a number of States are deploying “Vote By Mail Permanently!” Here’s a picture on a bus in the San Francisco Bay Area. What a nightmare.
I suspect that, for some election officials, the appeal of vote-by-mail is a bit [...]

The Swiss have implemented quantum cryptography to transfer votes to a central tallying authority. This is pretty cool, and I applaud the Swiss for trying new technologies to improve election security.
However, marketing this as “unbreakable encryption” is troubling. I can’t help but see this as a version of Gene Spafford’s warning writ large:

SSL is like [...]

[With apologies to my grandmothers, some of the most insightful people I've known.]
When you want to build a publicly accountable secure system, must you build to the lowest common denominator? The key example is, of course, voting. It’s clear that you have to build the user interface to the lowest common denominator: given minimal direction, [...]

Republicans in California are trying to split the electoral votes proportionally in time for the 2008 elections. They say it’s “more fair.”
Are you kidding me? Seriously? Is this the level of lying that we’re dealing with now? Obviously, it’s only fair if all states do this. If only “blue states” do this, or if only [...]

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 [...]