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 Mac OS X, and it should work on Linux/Unix, too. You need Python 2.5 or above, PyCrypto, git, and subversion. You need about 30 minutes of download time, and 1 hour of processing. And then you can check the results you’ve computed against … Continue reading Takoma Park 2009: the conclusion

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 choice #1, are “exhausted”, meaning they don’t count anymore. In fact, the rules for Takoma Park state that, in that case, the next candidate choice counts, but if two choices are skipped, then it’s exhausted. He’s absolutely right, and I’ve updated my tally code appropriately, … Continue reading Takoma Park: auditing the auditor

[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 right in the backend? That’s where the audit work comes in. I’ve now run the Meeting 3 verification, and it looks good: the confirmation codes were properly opened, and I’ve posted my own re-computed version of the confirmation codes. If you’re a Takoma Park … Continue reading Takoma Park: so can I see my confirmation code already?

[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 of those ballot commitments to ensure that the P and D tables were generated correctly. The short version of the story is that it all checks out, and the ballots look well-formed. Check out the detailed audit data. That said, there was one issue … Continue reading Takoma Park: Meeting 2

[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 1: the election officials get together, agree on election parameters, and generate the commitments to the Ballot Table of 5000 ballots (called the P Table for historical reasons) and the 40 Shuffle Tables (called the D Tables). Why 40 shuffle tables? It’s a … Continue reading Takoma Park Election: the 7 steps of auditing

In November of this year, citizens of Takoma Park, Maryland will use the Scantegrity voting system in their municipal election. This is a significant milestone for open-audit voting systems: the first time a government official is elected using a voting system that is verifiable from start to finish by any observer, even resistant to insider attacks. As I’m not a member of the Scantegrity team, the credit for this goes to the whole Scantegrity team. Understandably, the Takoma Park Election Board wants an independent audit of this election. They asked for my help, and I happily agreed. I’m volunteering my … Continue reading Auditing the Takoma Park Election