April 25, 2024

How NOT to Assess an E-voting System

by Vanessa Teague, an Australian computer scientist, cryptographer, and security/privacy expert. (Part 2 of a 5-part series starting here) Australian elections are known for the secret ballot and a long history of being peaceful, transparent and well run. So it may surprise you to learn that the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) is […]

How to Assess an E-voting System

Part 1 of a 5-part series If I can shop and bank online, why can’t I vote online?   David Jefferson explained in 2011 why internet voting is so difficult to make secure,  I summarized again in 2021 why internet voting is still inherently insecure, and many other experts have explained it too.  Still, several […]

A PDF File Is Not Paper, So PDF Ballots Cannot Be Verified

A new paper by Henry Herrington, a computer science undergraduate at Princeton University, demonstrates that a hacked PDF ballot can display one set of votes to the voter, but different votes after it’s emailed – or uploaded – to election officials doing the counting. For overseas voters or voters with disabilities, many states provide “Remote Accessible Vote […]

ES&S Uses Undergraduate Project to Lobby New York Legislature on Risky Voting Machines

The New York State Legislature is considering a bill that would ban all-in-one voting machines. That is, voting machines that can both print votes on a ballot and scan and count votes from a ballot – all in the same paper path. This is an important safeguard because such machines, if they are hacked by […]

“Signal Loss” and advertising privacy on Facebook

The 2021 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, a major award administered by a Japanese foundation, goes to Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, a Chinese computer scientist who earned PhDs from Harvard and the University of Illinois before being a professor at MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and then becoming Dean of an important theoretical computer science education program […]