Five years ago I described a serious security flaw in the design of all-in-one voting machines made by two competing manufacturers, ES&S and Dominion. These all-in-one machines work like this: the voter indicates choices on a touchscreen; then a printer prints the votes onto a paper ballot; the voter has a chance to review the […]
Unsealing the Halderman report would be Responsible Vulnerability Disclosure
May 12, 2023 by 5 Comments
Statement by Computer Security Experts, May 12, 2023 The report on security flaws in Dominion voting machines, written by Professors J. Alex Halderman and Drew Springall in July 2021 and placed under seal by the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, should be immediately unsealed by the Court and be made public. […]
Willful disregard of voter intent in Los Angeles
May 8, 2023 by 2 Comments
Part 4 of a 4-part series When the voter marks 2 votes in a vote-for-1 contest, or 5 votes in a vote-for-4 contest (etc.), that’s called an overvote. The Los Angeles VSAP optical-scan voting machines are so eager to treat a mark as a vote, that they treat stray marks of the kind illustrated here […]
Expensive and ineffective recounts in Los Angeles County
May 5, 2023 by Leave a Comment
Part 3 of a 4-part series In a recent article I wrote about the recount of a very close tax-rate referendum in the city of Long Beach, California. The referendum passed by 16 votes out of 100,000 ballots; the opponents of the measure requested a recount, as they are entitled to do by California law—provided […]
Best practices for sorting mail-in ballots
May 3, 2023 by 1 Comment
Part 2 of a 4-part series My previous article explained why it’s a bad practice, used in some election offices, to open absentee ballot envelopes before sorting them by precinct (or ballot-style). Those jurisdictions rely on the ballot-style barcode, printed on the optical-scan ballot, that tells the Central Count Optical Scan (CCOS) voting machine what’s […]
