Even before the crisis of COVID-19, which will have severe implications for the conduct of the 2020 elections, the United States faced another elections crisis of legitimacy: Americans can no longer take for granted that election losers will concede a closely fought election after election authorities (or courts) have declared a winner. Along with two […]

It is a well understood scientific fact that Internet voting in public elections is not securable: “the Internet should not be used for the return of marked ballots. … [N]o known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet.“ But can legislatures (city councils, county boards, or the […]

Thanks to Annette Zimmermann and Arvind Narayanan for their helpful feedback on this post. Algorithmic bias is currently generating a lot of lively public and scholarly debate, especially amongst computer scientists and philosophers. But do these two groups really speak the same language—and if not, how can they start to do so? I noticed at […]

In my previous posts, I’ve been discussing ballot-level comparison audits, a form of risk-limiting audit. Ballots are imprinted with serial numbers (after they leave the voter’s hands); during the audit, a person must find a particular numbered ballot in a batch of a thousand (more or less). With CCOS (central-count optical scan) this works fine: […]

In my previous posts, I’ve been discussing ballot-level comparison audits, a form of risk-limiting audit. Ballots are imprinted with serial numbers (after they leave the voter’s hands); during the audit, a person must find a particular numbered ballot in a batch of a thousand (more or less). If the ballot papers are numbered consecutively, that’s […]