How mail-in ballot envelopes are handled by local election officials can make a huge difference in the cost of recounts and can also affect the security of elections against one form of voting fraud. Counties that count thousands or millions of mail-in (or dropbox) ballots can do it two ways: Sort-then-scan: Sort the ballot envelopes […]
Unrecoverable Election Screwup in Williamson County TX
February 16, 2023 by
In the November 2020 election in Williamson County, Texas, flawed e-pollbook software resulted in voters inadvertently voting for candidates and questions not from their own districts but from others in the same county. These voters were deprived of the opportunity to vote for candidates they were entitled to vote for—and their votes were wrongly counted […]
Next Steps for Mercer County Following Voting-Machine Failure
December 14, 2022 by
Hand-marked optical-scan paper ballots are the most secure form of voting: with any other method, if the computerized voting machines are hacked, there’s no trustworthy paper trail from which we can determine the true outcome of the election, based on the choices that voters actually indicated. Even those voting methods that appear to have a […]
Why the voting machines failed in Mercer County
December 1, 2022 by
On Election Day, November 8, 2022, every voting machine in every polling place in Mercer County, New Jersey failed to work. Voters in each precinct filled in the ovals in their preprinted optical-scan paper ballots, but the voting machines couldn’t read them. So voters were instructed to put their ballots into “slot 3” of the […]
Is Internet Voting Secure? The Science and the Policy Battles
September 12, 2022 by
I will be presenting a similarly titled paper at the 2022 Symposium Contemporary Issues in Election Law run by the University of New Hampshire Law review, October 7th in Concord, NH. The paper will be published in the UNH Law Review in 2023 and is available now on SSRN. I have already serialized parts of […]
