November 22, 2024

Phone number recycling creates serious security and privacy risks to millions of people

By Kevin Lee and Arvind Narayanan 35 million phone numbers are disconnected every year in the U.S., according to the Federal Communications Commission. Most of these numbers are not disconnected forever; after a while, carriers reassign them to new subscribers. Through the years, these new subscribers have sometimes reported receiving calls and messages meant for […]

Internet Voting is Still Inherently Insecure

Legislation for voting by internet is pending in Colorado, and other states have been on the verge of permitting ballots to be returned by internet. But voting by internet is too insecure, too hackable, to use in U.S. elections.  Every scientific study comes to the same conclusion—the Defense Department’s study group in 2004, the National […]

Juan Gilbert’s Transparent BMD

Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy recently hosted a talk by Professor Juan Gilbert of the University of Florida, in which he demonstrated his interesting new invention and presented results from user studies. What’s the problem with ballot-marking devices? It’s well known that a voting system must use paper ballots to be trustworthy (at least […]

Expert analysis of Antrim County, Michigan

Preliminary unofficial election results posted at 4am after the November 3rd 2020 election, by election administrators in Antrim County Michigan, were incorrect by thousands of votes–in the Presidential race and in local races. Within days, Antrim County election administrators corrected the error, as confirmed by a full hand recount of the ballots, but everyone wondered: […]

How lever-action voting machines really worked

Over the years I have written many articles about direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines, precinct-count optical-scan (PCOS) voting machines, ballot-marking devices (BMDs), and other 21st-century voting technology. But I haven’t written much about 20th-century lever machines; these machines were banned by the U.S. Congress in the Help America Vote Act and have not been used […]