April 26, 2024

Magical thinking about Ballot-Marking-Device contingency plans

The Center for Democracy and Technology recently published a report, “No Simple Answers: A Primer on Ballot Marking Device Security”, by William T. Adler.   Overall, it’s well-informed, clearly presents the problems as of 2022, and it’s definitely worth reading.  After explaining the issues and controversies, the report presents recommendations, most of which make a lot […]

New Study Analyzing Political Advertising on Facebook, Google, and TikTok

By Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Christelle Tessono, Arvind Narayanan, Mihir Kshirsagar With the 2022 midterm elections in the United States fast approaching, political campaigns are poised to spend heavily to influence prospective voters through digital advertising. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google, and TikTok will play an important role in distributing that content. But our new study […]

Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions “frens” or enemies of crypto?

As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences – Dcentral Con and Consensus – held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but we’d yet to conduct […]

Improving Your Relationship with Social Media May Call for a Targeted Approach

” … it turns out that the students who saw the most positive outcomes were those who designed their social media intervention in a targeted way.”

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 […]