Online platforms, which monitor and intervene in the lives of billions of people, routinely host thousands of experiments to evaluate policies, test products, and contribute to theory in the social sciences. These experiments are also powerful tools to monitor injustice and govern human and algorithm behavior. How can we do field experiments at scale, reliably, […]

In order to run trustworthy elections using hackable computers (including hackable voting machines), “elections should be conducted with human-readable paper ballots. … States should mandate risk-limiting audits prior to the certification of election results.” What is a risk-limiting audit, and how do you perform one? An RLA is a human inspection of a random sample of […]

Because voting machines contain computers that can be hacked to make them cheat, “Elections should be conducted with human-readable paper ballots. These may be marked by hand or by machine (using a ballot-marking device); they may be counted by hand or by machine (using an optical scanner).  Recounts and audits should be conducted by human inspection […]

In November 2018 I got opinions on voting machines and vote-by-mail from 17 experts on election verification, who have experience running/observing/studying elections in 17 states. On the acceptability of these in-the-polling-place voting technologies, in the context of U.S. elections: The consensus is that Direct Recording Electronic voting machines are unacceptable, even with a VVPAT (“voter verified paper audit […]

Well designed ballot layouts allow voters to make their intentions clear; badly designed ballots invite voters to make mistakes.  This year, the Florida Senate race may be decided by a misleading ballot layout—a layout that violated the ballot design recommendations of the Election Assistance Commission. In Miami Palm Beach, Florida in the year 2000, the badly […]