Benlog

Category: voting

  • Go Vote

    Election season is in full force. The TV programs, the newspapers, and a whole bunch of smart folks are telling you that voting machines are broken, that they won’t count your vote, that democracy can be hacked (thanks, HBO.) No doubt there are serious security issues with today’s voting machines. All of them, with or…

  • Ballot Secrecy!

    I am continually surprised at how poor press coverage of voting issues can be, especially when it comes to absentee/vote-by-mail/vote-by-internet stories. Here’s a story on TechWeb about “secure vote-by-mail for the military”. Not one mention of ballot secrecy and issues of voter coercion! And the kicker: PostX is encouraging the government to allow soldiers to…

  • At the MIT/Caltech Voter Registration Conference

    I’m at the MIT/Caltech Voter Registration Conference. It should be quite interesting to see what people are thinking on this oft-ignored issue. Later today, I’m presenting a poster on Scratch & Vote.

  • Slides from My Voting Review Talk

    Well, I had far too much material for my talk today… it’s not easy giving an overview of the works of Benaloh, Chaum, Neff, and other greats in the field! But I tried, and it was fun. I’ve posted the slides, though I never did get to the paper-based crypto systems. (There are 160 pages…

  • Fixing Bugs and Breaking Certification

    During the primaries, voting machines in Maryland broke down. As a result, the manufacturer, Diebold, has been hard at work on a fix. Today, they claim to have fixed the problem, though the Maryland Election Commissioner is cautiously waiting until further tests are conducted ext week before breathing a sigh of relief. Clearly, this fix…

  • A Talk on the History of Cryptographic Voting

    I’m giving a talk at Harvard CRCS, my new home, about the history of secure voting using cryptography. Here’s the full announcement: CRCS Privacy & Security Lunch Seminar Speaker: Ben Adida, Harvard CRCS Date: Wednesday, 27 September Time: 12-1:30 (lunch provided) Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119 (one floor above ground level) Title: A Brief History of…

  • The Secret Ballot is not Optional

    Over on Scott Aaronson’s blog, I read an interesting post about voting, and one comment from Bram Cohen regarding a new voting proposal called VoiceVote. A few minutes into reading the proposal, I find the following: Why VOICE Permits Voters to Retain a Paper Copy of Their Ballot Giving the voter a paper record of…

  • Princeton, Diebold, and the elephant in the room.

    Feldman, Halderman, and Felten (from Princeton) have just released an in-depth review of an actual Diebold Touchscreen voting machine. There isn’t anything surprising about their results, but it is a very good thing that it was done with this level of care, detail, and access. I particularly like the “Vote Stealing Control Panel,” which really…

  • Scratch & Vote in the Press

    MIT Technology Review just published a description of Scratch & Vote, the simple paper-based cryptographic voting scheme that Ron Rivest and I devised. It’s great to see growing interest in cryptographic voting from the scientific press, especially since the debate has focused far too much on “paper or no paper,” when the real question should…

  • Viva la Defense

    My thesis defense, aka “viva voce”, aka “soutenance” is next Thursday, 9am. It’s open to the public, so if you’re really interested in cryptographic voting systems, you can come on over to the Stata Center. Now back to my slides….

  • WOTE 2006

    Peter Ryan, Ronald Rivest, and David Chaum are organizing the Workshop On Trustworthy Elections – 2006. I’m on the program committee. Send in your research! There’s much exciting work left to do in the voting field, and as the press begins to understand that neither touch-screens nor paper-trail machines are panaceas, there will emerge an…

  • VVPAT is a placebo

    Dan Tokaji points to a recent opinion by Black Box Voting’s Bev Harris and concludes that we may be converging on the idea that VVPAT is a placebo. This is a very interesting development. One has to be very careful when making statements like “VVPAT is a placebo,” because the folks pushing VVPAT have the…

  • Cryptography and American Idol

    The Fox TV show American Idol receives in excess of 30 million votes per week. Every Tuesday night, contestants sing, then people vote, then every Wednesday night, the results are announced. No doubt that tens of millions of people watch on Wednesday night just to hear the results, announced with great dramatic emphasis by the…

  • A National Vote?

    I should be working on finishing up my submission to CRYPTO 2006, but I just heard about National Popular Vote, an initiative to start electing US presidents by popular vote rather than Electoral College. What’s brilliant about this plan is that it has a realistic transition phase that I haven’t seen before. So it might…