Denver Goes "Back to Paper" -- Sort Of

A news article from Denver notes that the city is reversing its experiment from its last election, and going "back to paper."

It's Back to Paper Ballots, Precincts, For This Year's Elections 

This only sort of true. Yes, it's true that Denver is using a voting method that election officials say they're more comfortable with, and that some voters will likely view as more trustworthy. 

Reflection on Independence Day

Yesterday, on July 4th, I took some time to reflect on nearly 400 years of elections in North America, in the hopes of having something meaningful to share in this blog, not about technology, but something fundamental. With little immediate success, I picked up a book, and re-read some email from a friend.

"Privatized" Elections and Internet Programming

Attending and speaking at the Personal Democracy Forum last week, I came across a good phrase, "privatized elections," used to describe the widening role that private companies play in running U.S. government elections.

Test results on New Jersey e-voting machines will be released

Good news from New Jersey! A judge there has reversed her earlier decision that test results on Sequoia voting machines could not be made public -- a story that we discussed a few months ago here. The new ruling means that conmputer experts at Princeton University will be able to analyze the machines starting next week, and publish their results in late September before the November election.

Real Viruses, Real Voting Systems, Real Concern

The notable election systems snafu news items of the week is a virus infection of Windows-based election systems sold by Premier Systems (Diebold) and used in Florida's Pinellas county.

As a cause for alarm, the incident is pretty low, in that the infection was by ordinary Windows OS viruses, which can cripple a Windows system in a generic way. That's not the much-speculated "targeted malware" that acts to change election data in the cases where the virus gets a foothold on an actual voting system machine.

Arkansas E-Vote Flipping: Force 9 Gale?

It seems like e-voting snafus are like weather: there’s always a bit of a storm somewhere, and now and then you get a big one. Although we can thank our lucky stars that we haven’t had a real hurricane, an electronic equivalent of Florida in 2000, the recent Arkansas vote-flipping snafu might qualify as a force 9 gale.

And because this time it is clear the outcome of the race was also flipped, this case of Arkansas State House District 45 in 2008 might

Dutch Ban E-voting

Voting in the Netherlands is now officially a process of hand-counted, hand-marked paper ballots. Why wouldn’t this work in the U.S. as well? A fair question...

Uncounted votes in NC, programming error

Today's news of e-voting malfunction underscores my previous point about complexity of voting systems. This time, about 4000 ballots went uncounted in North Carolina's election this week.

Shifting the Heavy Lifting: from E-voting System Vendor to Pollworker

Thanks to election technology expert Noel Runyan, I can explain another reason why the U.S. election systems market is under-served by today’s for-profit vendors of election technology. (And to read up on several other reasons, see Noel’s congressional testimony.)

Open Source: Good for Business, Innovation … and the Public

In a recent article on Businessweek.com, John Hagel and John Seely Brown describe the powerful innovation strategy used by the Myelin Repair Foundation (MRF). MRF is a Silicon Valley nonprofit using an open-source approach to scientific research and drug