vote

Evidence presented in New Jersey e-voting discrepancies

Despite the threat of legal action by one voting machine vendor, Princeton University professor Ed Felten is continuing his independent investigation of perceived irregularities in New Jersey's February 5, 2008 presidential primary election. On Friday, a New Jersey state judge ruled that voting rights activists will also have the right to have their own independent expert examine the state's electronic voting machines.

The question is integrity. What Felten has found so far isn't enough to change the election results, but evidence presented on his blog site suggests there might be enough to undermine our confidence in the … Read more

Shamos: Why e-voting paper trails are a bad idea

PITTSBURGH--Many computer scientists have been arguing for years that electronic voting machines absolutely must sport paper trails that can be verified by the voter and subsequently used in manual recounts.

It's a formal policy position of the U.S. arm of the Association for Computing Machinery, the professional organization of computer scientists. Stanford University's David Dill even created the pro-paper-trail Verified Voting Foundation and has co-authored an article for us that argues against Internet voting, too.

But support of paper trails is not unanimous. Michael Shamos, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University who teaches an … Read more

Republicans reject funding for paper-based voting

Opposition from Republicans and the White House has sparked defeat of a Democratic proposal to reimburse state election officials for converting their electronic voting machines to paper-based systems ahead of November's election.

The U.S. House of Representatives measure, called the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, had been called up for what's known as a "suspension" vote on Tuesday. That means in order for it to pass, two-thirds of the House would have had to vote in favor of the bill.

Instead, the bill fell well short of that threshold, garnering a 239-178 … Read more

Expert says flawed e-voting systems need constant audits

Elections departments around the country have spent millions on electronic voting systems that are flawed and officials aren't about to throw them out and start all over. The only solution is to conduct audits to verify the count after every election, a researcher and expert on electronic voting said at RSA 2008 on Thursday.

David Wagner, computer science professor at University of California, Berkeley, led a state of California-commissioned study last year of the three major electronic voting systems. The study found serious vulnerabilities in each system that would allow someone with access to just one of the machines … Read more

Sequoia Voting Systems site hacked

Part of the Sequoia Voting Systems Web site was defaced and subsequently taken down on Thursday, according to a report in InfoWorld. As CNET prepared this blog, the entire Sequoia Voting System site was frequently inaccessible.

The defacement and subsequent takedown occurred Thursday morning on the company's Ballot Blog page. Sequoia is one of a handful of electronic voting companies used in the United States. It has in recent days come under fire for apparent discrepancies in voter tallies in last month's New Jersey primary election.

The Ballot Blog page on SequoiaVote.com had contained information from Sequoia … Read more

Sequoia warns Princeton professors over e-voting analysis

Ed Felten is a Princeton University computer scientist who became well-known in technology circles for a paper he co-authored that showed flaws in digital audio watermarks. More precisely, Felten became well-known for the legal threats he received at the time from the Recording Industry Association of America.

Now Sequoia Voting Systems, which is one of the largest e-voting machine manufacturers in the United States, is threatening Felten too.

On Tuesday, Felten posted e-mail he and fellow Princeton professor Andrew Appel received from Sequoia saying:

As you have likely read in the news media, certain New Jersey election officials have stated … Read more

PollDaddy launches public results database

PollDaddy makes a polling engine I like so much that I asked them to provide the technology for the Webware 100 awards. Thanks to them, I couldn't be happier with the way the voting is going. As of this writing, we've recorded more than 980,000 votes. (Go vote!)

Today, the company is taking its technology and opening it up in an interesting way: polls that users create on free accounts are now accessible from a centralized PollDaddy site, and each poll also gets its own page where users can not just participate in it but add comments … Read more

Electronic voting and partial audits

On February 16th fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamosi wrote an item headlined "With improvements, e-voting could be good, says researcher." I think that e-voting is a very bad thing and that no "improvements" will ever convert it to a good thing. But I'm not an expert on the subject, so I asked Rebecca Mercuri, a specialist in computer security and electronic voting, if she would like to respond to the claim made by the "researcher" in question. Mercuri has appeared many times on the Personal Computer Show to discuss electronic voting, which is … Read more

With improvements, e-voting could be good, says researcher.

WASHINGTON--In a keynote address at this year's ShmooCon, an East Coast computer hacker conference, J. Alex Halderman said that electronic voting machines could be good for the electorate--with some modifications.

Halderman is a graduate student studying under Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, who is best known for demonstrating that the electronic voting machines produced by Diebold and other companies are vulnerable to attack. Diebold has since changed the name of election equipment to Premier Election Solutions. Felten was to make the keynote address, but canceled at the last minute due to the flu. Halderman is … Read more