News & Insights

We’re Making History in Real Time.

Our timely insights share informed perspectives on the rapidly evolving story of Election Technology, as it unfolds.

Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

Five Ways to Call a Voting Machine a ...

Today I have an excellent example of how important it is, and sometimes difficult, to maintain clarity around the technology that we're building in the TrustTheVote project, and what we are (and are not) doing in OSDV generally. This particular example illustrates how voting technology is already bedeviled by jargon, inconsistent terminology, and procedural confusion -- so that terminology and explanation that work for one group of people just don't work elsewhere.

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E. John Sebes E. John Sebes

Mini-Minnesota in Virginia

I'd like to call your attention to this week's electile dysfunction news, which is about a mini-Minnesota situation in Fairfax County, Virginia. I think it's instructive because it illustrates how some problems with "paperless" voting are actually quite similar to a more old-fashioned form of voting, "paper only" voting, and a mooted new-fangled kind of voting, Internet voting.

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E. John Sebes E. John Sebes

The Machineries of Democracy: Failed Trust, Elections in Courts

As you might imagine, it is hard to choose from the manyevents of Election Day 2008 to report and reflect on! But I thought that I’d pick a handful of events that show just how vitally important it is the election equipment be designed carefully – and the consequences of products that aren’t, and vendors that don’t seem to care. I have to say, it’s potentially dire, which is why I’ve picked as many as 3 events to support my claims.

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Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

A first: election system vendors admits losing votes

Here is a first-ever admission: a real software bug in a real voting system can drop real votes, and has dropped votes. And perhaps has been doing so for years. I wrote earlier about the wrangle between the state of Ohio and Premier Election Systems (formerly Diebold), in which some real vote dropping was blamed on anti-virus software (which wasn't allowed to be in the machines in the first place!).

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