December 7, 2024

A Brief History of Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration

By Henry Birge-Lee, Grace Cimaszewski, Liang Wang, Cyrill Krähenbühl, and Prateek Mittal “Multi-Perspective Issuance Corroboration” (or “MPIC”) is currently under discussion as an industry-wide standard by the CA/Browser Forum Server Certificate Working Group, and possibly by other Forum Working Groups in the future (i.e., the S/MIME Working Group). This is a promising idea that aims […]

Building on Colorado’s Success: All States Need Mandatory Rideshare Transparency Reporting

Colorado has become the first state mandating transparency specifically around platform fees and driver wages from rideshare platforms like Uber and Lyft, whose opaque AI and algorithmic operations have historically evaded legal oversight. On June 5 2024, Governor Jared Polis signed SB24-075, the Transportation Network Company Transparency bill into an act, compelling these platforms to […]

Rows and Columns, the County Line, and the ExpressVote XL

Why did New Jersey counties keep choosing one insecure voting machine after another, for decades?  Only this year did I realize what the reason might be. A century ago, New Jersey (like many other states) adopted lever voting machines that listed the offices by row, with the parties (and their candidates) across the columns: The […]

A Syllabus of Actions for Building the Society We Want

This post is about a Syllabus of Actions, the result of last fall’s Building the Society We Want workshop, co-hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy and Center for Human Values. The central theme of the workshop was rejecting the premise that any new technology constitutes “progress” except insofar as it causes too many […]

Barcodes on paper ballots: the good, the bad, and the stealth

Paper ballots should not have barcodes to mark votes; paper ballots should have barcodes to mark ballot styles.  Why is that?  What’s the difference?  And at the end, I describe a useful innovation from a company called Voting.works.   One of the most important reasons we use paper ballots in elections is to protect our elections […]