Summary: Voting machines can be hacked; risk-limiting audits of paper ballots can detect incorrect outcomes, whether from hacked voting machines or programming inaccuracies; recounts of paper ballots can correct those outcomes; but some methods for producing paper ballots are more auditable and recountable than others. A now-standard principle of computer-counted public elections is, use a voter-verified […]
Search Results for: voting
An unverifiability principle for voting machines
October 22, 2018 by
In my last three articles I described the ES&S ExpressVote, the Dominion ImageCast Evolution, and the Dominion ImageCast X (in its DRE+VVPAT configuration). There’s something they all have in common: they all violate a certain principle of voter verifiability. Any voting machine whose physical hardware can print votes onto the ballot after the last time […]
Design flaw in Dominion ImageCast Evolution voting machine
October 16, 2018 by
The Dominion ImageCast Evolution looks like a pretty good voting machine, but it has a serious design flaw: after you mark your ballot, after you review your ballot, the voting machine can print more votes on it!. Fortunately, this design flaw has been patented by a rival company, ES&S, which sued to prevent Dominion from selling […]
Are voting-machine modems truly divorced from the Internet?
February 22, 2018 by
(This article is written jointly with my colleague Kyle Jamieson, who specializes in wireless networks.) [See also: The myth of the hacker-proof voting machine] The ES&S model DS200 optical-scan voting machine has a cell-phone modem that it uses to upload election-night results from the voting machine to the “county central” canvassing computer. We know it’s […]
Blockchains and voting
September 12, 2017 by
I’ve been asked about a number of ideas lately involving voting systems and blockchains. This blog piece talks about all the security properties that a voting system needs to have, where blockchains help, and where they don’t. Let’s start off a decade ago, when Daniel Sandler and I first wrote a paper saying blockchains would be […]
