Earlier this month I gave a public lecture at the invitation of the Center for Information Technology Policy and the League of Women Voters. The League had asked, “What can we as voters do to protect our elections and our representative government?” The video is available here. A longer video, that includes introductions, Q&A moderated […]

If your state is voting by mail, then you can’t process all the ballot envelopes on November 3rd — it’s just too labor-intensive. The details vary by state, as every state has different laws, but (basically) for each mail-in ballot received by the county election clerk, they must: Sort the envelopes by “ballot style” (municipality […]

It has been well understood for more than 15 years that computerized voting machines can be hacked to make them cheat (or might be misconfigured by accident), and therefore it is essential to have random audits of the ballots. That is: Human inspection of paper ballots that the voters marked, of a random sample of […]

For hundreds of years, New Jersey voters have voted in their local precinct polling places (800 registered voters per precinct), with only a tiny percentage voting absentee. This year, for reasons of public health in the pandemic, all voters will receive a mail-in ballot; a few polling places will be open on November 3rd for […]

Many election administrators in U.S. states and counties need to receive and open PDF files from voters. Some of these administrators receive these PDFs as e-mail attachments. These may be filled-out voter registration forms, or even voted ballots from UOCAVA (overseas and military) voters. We all know that malware can lurk in e-mail attachments; how […]