Several election officials in Clay County, Kentucky, have been arrested and indicted on Federal charges for alleged activities that many would refer to as "election fraud" but also come under the heading of conspiracy and racketeering. If  true, it is a very unpleasant story, and one that illustrates the real (though apparently rare) risks of elections being tampered with by insiders.

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I have to confess to being appalled by the number of times recently that I have heard people talk about potential benefits of "security by obscurity" for voting systems. It’s one of those bad old ideas that just won’t die: if you hide the inner workings (source code) of a complex device (a voting system), that makes it harder for an adversary to break (hack, steal elections).

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The recent New York Times editorial "Still Broken" is well worth the read, especially for its significant focus on dysfunction in the voter registration systems — something that often gets second billing to recollections of hanging chad and recent vote-dropping voting machine stories.

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I’d like to call your attention to this week’s electile dysfunction news, which is about a mini-Minnesota situation in Fairfax County, Virginia. I think it’s instructive because it illustrates how some problems with "paperless" voting are actually quite similar to a more old-fashioned form of voting, "paper only" voting, and a mooted new-fangled kind of voting, Internet voting.

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I got a great and deceptively simple question recently: what guidelines should be used for testing of voting machines?

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It never ceases to amaze me how often, and in what varied circumstances, I meet people who are not only quite clued in about election technology reform, but also surprising aware of some of the devils that lurk in the details. Today’s devil: "field validation" of voting devices, or: if I went to vote in a precinct, and someone told me I was about to vote on the wonderful new trustworthy voting system that I had heard about, how would I know that that was the device I was about to use?

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No, I am not going to lecture on why Internet voting is bad for half a dozen different reasons. In fact, Internet voting is both a horribly loaded term, and also a general topic that is not germane to our current work at OSDV — which is technologically fixing the election technology mess that we are in, without also trying to change the way elections work.

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In a previous posting, I referred to paper ballots as part of a recipe for election procedures that provide provide integrity and assurance by not relying solely on either computers or people to operate perfectly. As promised, here is some more info, especially important because there seems to be an increasing trend towards a "hybrid" style of election operations with both paper ballots and a variant of computerized voting.

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Oregon is one of several states that this month have legislative activity that’s starting to look at the phrase "Internet voting". Wired Oregon reports on Attempts to Bring Elections into Digital Age as a pair of bills, one for online voting, and one for online voter registration. But the reference to the recent report on the Pew Center on the States is a bit misleading.

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Well, the issue of "source code disclosure" just keeps coming back at us. Here is the latest variant that needs some de-confusion: how are open source practices different from proprietary-systems vendors who voluntarily choose to disclose the source code of their software?

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