December 23, 2024

How to do a Risk-Limiting Audit

In the U.S. we use voting machines to count the votes. Most of the time they’re very accurate indeed, but they can make big mistakes if there’s a bug in the software, or if a hacker installs fraudulent vote-counting software, or if there’s a misconfigured ballot-definition file, or if the scanner is miscalibrated. Therefore we […]

ImageCast Evolution voting machine: Mitigations, misleadings, and misunderstandings

Two months ago I wrote that the New York State Board of Elections was going to request a reexamination of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine, in light of a design flaw that I had previously described. The Dominion ICE is an optical-scan voting machine. Most voters are expected to feed in a hand-marked optical […]

BMDs are not meaningfully auditable

The 2019 article described here was later revised and published in a peer-reviewed journal as, Ballot-Marking Devices Cannot Assure the Will of the Voters, by Andrew W. Appel, Richard A. DeMillo, and Philip B. Stark. Election Law Journal, vol. 19 no. 3, pp. 432-450, September 2020. (Non-paywall version, differs in formatting and pagination). This paper has just […]

Voting machines I recommend

I’ve written several articles critical of specific voting machines, and you might wonder, are there any voting machines I like? For in-person voting (whether on election day or in early vote centers), I recommend Precinct-Count Optical Scan (PCOS) voting machines, with a ballot-marking device (BMD) available for those voters unable to mark a ballot by […]

Reexamination of an all-in-one voting machine

The co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections has formally requested that the Election Operations Unit of the State Board re-examine the State’s certification of the Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine. The Dominion ImageCast Evolution (also called Dominion ICE) is an “all-in-one” voting machine that combines in the same paper path an optical scanner […]