March 29, 2024

Unrecoverable Election Screwup in Williamson County TX

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

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 […]

Switzerland’s E-voting: The Threat Model

Part 5 of a 5-part series starting here Switzerland commissioned independent expert reviews of the E-voting system built by Swiss Post.   One of those experts concluded, “as imperfect as the current system might be when judged against a nonexistent ideal, the current system generally appears to achieve its stated goals, under the corresponding assumptions […]

What the Assessments Say About the Swiss E-voting System

(Part 4 of a 5-part series starting here) In 2021 the Swiss government commissioned several in-depth technical studies of the Swiss Post E-voting system, by independent experts from academia and private consulting firms.  They sought to assess, does the protocol as documented guarantee the security called for by Swiss law (the “ordinance on electronic voting”, […]

How the Swiss Post E-voting system addresses client-side vulnerabilities

(Part 3 of a 5-part series starting here) In Part 1, I described how Switzerland decided to assess the security and accuracy of its e-voting system.  Swiss Post is the “vendor” developing the system, the Swiss cantons are the “customer” deploying it in their elections, and the Swiss Parliament and Federal Chancellery are the “regulators,”  […]