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.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

RSA Conference Panel: Lessons Learned from 2008 Election Technology

I spoke in a panel at the RSA Conference yesterday, on the topic of lessons learned in 2008 about voting technology. I thought I'd use this blog to share my remarks, but even though we each spoke for only 5 minutes before the question and answer period, I covered three areas of lessons learned; so I'll cover them in separate blog posts on each topic of (1) Usability lessons (2) Audit lessons (3) Transparency lessons.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

More Humbolt Election Tech Weirdness: Premier Huffs

Well, I am sorry to say that I have to make an exception to my avoidance of casting voting system vendors in a bad light -- in this case Premier Systems (formerly Diebold). I was rather proud of PS(fD) when they owned up to the "ballot dropping" software problem (paper ballots scanned and apparently counted, but the first few not actually counted, and no log record of the deletion) that was discovered in the post-election audit conducted in Humboldt County by registrar Read More

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

Kentucky: Election Fraud and E-voting

Several election officials in Clay County, Kentucky, have been arrested and indicted on Federal charges for alleged activities that many would refer to as "election fraud" but also come under the heading of conspiracy and racketeering. If  true, it is a very unpleasant story, and one that illustrates the real (though apparently rare) risks of elections being tampered with by insiders.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

No "Security By Obscurity" for Voting, Please

I have to confess to being appalled by the number of times recently that I have heard people talk about potential benefits of "security by obscurity" for voting systems. It's one of those bad old ideas that just won't die: if you hide the inner workings (source code) of a complex device (a voting system), that makes it harder for an adversary to break (hack, steal elections).

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

"How Do I Know that This Voting Machine is the Good One?"

It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today's devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

Internet Voting: Perils and Summary

No, I am not going to lecture on why Internet voting is bad for half a dozen different reasons. In fact, Internet voting is both a horribly loaded term, and also a general topic that is not germane to our current work at OSDV -- which is technologically fixing the election technology mess that we are in, without also trying to change the way elections work.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

Trusting Neither People, Paper, or Computers: Hybrid Voting Scheme

In a previous posting, I referred to paper ballots as part of a recipe for election procedures that provide provide integrity and assurance by not relying solely on either computers or people to operate perfectly. As promised, here is some more info, especially important because there seems to be an increasing trend towards a "hybrid" style of election operations with both paper ballots and a variant of computerized voting.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

Oregon Elections in the Digital Age: Please Start at the Beginning

Oregon is one of several states that this month have legislative activity that's starting to look at the phrase "Internet voting". Wired Oregon reports on Attempts to Bring Elections into Digital Age as a pair of bills, one for online voting, and one for online voter registration. But the reference to the recent report on the Pew Center on the States is a bit misleading.

Read More
Voting System Technology Gregory Miller Voting System Technology Gregory Miller

Policy-Driven Design

Live from NASED, want to pass along a comment about the engineering realities of a Digital Public Works Project, in the midst of listening to Congressional staffers discuss what's up on the Hill regarding election reform legislation.  I just tweeted about the likelihood of making election day a federal holiday (its real and that should make our friends happy), but related comments on the panel sparks another observation.

Read More
Voting System Technology E. John Sebes Voting System Technology E. John Sebes

Outsourced Elections

Believe it not, elections in the U.S. are outsourced to for-profit companies. That's a statement I made when I spoke about election technology and election integrity at a DHS conference on technology and homeland security. I was asked what exactly I meant, and could give a specific example. I did, and explained the varying degrees of outsourcing. But I found an example in the recent election that is such a good example  that I can't resist sharing it.

Read More