e-voting

WASHINGTON--In a keynote address at this year's ShmooCon, an East Coast computer hacker conference, J. Alex Halderman said that electronic voting machines could be good for the electorate--with some modifications.

Halderman is a graduate student studying under Ed Felten, a professor of computer science at Princeton, who is best known for demonstrating that the electronic voting machines produced by Diebold and other companies are vulnerable to attack. Diebold has since changed the name of election equipment to Premier Election Solutions. Felten was to make the keynote address, but canceled at the last minute due to the flu. Halderman is … Read more

With this year's presidential race in full swing, it's easy to forget about alleged electronic voting glitches that snarled at least one congressional contest in 2006.

But a report issued by government auditors this week is drawing new attention to what many computer scientists view as the perils of touch-screen machines that don't produce a paper record.

It all goes back to the November 2006 election in Sarasota County, Fla., where more than 18,000 of the county's ballots--or, put another way, 1 in 7 voters--didn't register a pick in the U.S. House of … Read more

New Hampshire officials on Friday said they'll conduct a statewide hand recount of the results of Tuesday's primary in response to complaints from two underdog candidates. The last time New Hampshire conducted a statewide recount in a presidential primary was in 1980.

Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democratic congressman, and a Republican contender named Albert Howard, whose Web site proclaims "The Angel of the Lord told me in January of 1992 that Hillary Rodham Clinton and I would meet and be running against each other and that she would lose," will be expected to bear the costs … Read more

Glitches in touch-screen electronic voting machines without paper trails tend to rack up the most attention these days. But an irregularity over ballots marked by hand and scanned by a computer like standardized tests--known as the "optical-scan" approach--is poised to create a snafu in upcoming mayoral elections in San Francisco.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle report on Wednesday, there's concern among state officials that "less-sensitive" scanning machines at polling places across the California city won't be able to pick up ballots marked with anything other than a No. 2 pencil or a special … Read more

A Democratic-backed contingent in Congress is still hoping to enact a requirement that all electronic voting machines used in next fall's presidential elections produce voter-verified paper trails, but a bumpy road lies ahead.

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Rules met on Wednesday to begin discussing H.R. 811, the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007, but never reached an agreement on how to proceed with the bill. They were supposed to meet again on Friday morning, setting the stage for a vote as early as Monday, but that meeting was canceled.

As Congressional Quarterly reports, … Read more

Much of the debate surrounding the nation's required shift to electronic voting systems has boiled down to one major question: to paper trail, or not to paper trail?

But those dead-tree representations of a voter's intent do little good unless state election officials actually scrutinize a sampling of them after the election, know what they're looking for, and know what to do next, argues a new report (warning: 90-page PDF ahead) released Wednesday by researchers at two prominent law schools.

And most of them don't, according to the report's authors, who represent New York University … Read more

A recent report documenting computer scientists' ability to hack into voting machines certified for use in the state of California has already begun reverberating on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who happens to be one of the chief sponsors of a bill that would prohibit paperless voting machines by the 2010 federal elections, says she plans to hold a hearing in September on the report in the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which she leads. The politicians are expected to break for the summer at the end of this week.

In a statement Tuesday, Feinstein expressed dismay at &… Read more

Forgive me if this isn't some major news flash, but let's document it for posterity anyway: University of California computer scientists have recently shown it's possible to carry out a bevy of hacks on electronic voting machines currently certified for use in the Golden State.

In reports released late last week, the researchers chronicle their five-week endeavor, at the request of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, to exploit examine machines made by Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems and Diebold. The same models are also in use in many other states, according to a database compiled by the Election Reform Information Project. … Read more