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 […]

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 […]

This letter, signed by more than 20 election cybersecurity experts, was addressed to the Pennsylvania State Senate Committee on Government in response to a request for policy advice, but it applies in any state — especially those that use Ballot Marking Devices for all in-person voters: Georgia and South Carolina; most counties in Arkansas, New […]

Last year, I published a 5-part series about Switzerland’s e-voting system.  Like any internet voting system, it has inherent security vulnerabilities: if there are malicious insiders, they can corrupt the vote count; and if thousands of voters’ computers are hacked by malware, the malware can change votes as they are transmitted.   Switzerland “solves” the […]

To run vote centers that must supply many different ballot styles, for hand-markable paper ballots to be counted by optical scanners, it’s convenient and effective to use ballot-on-demand (BOD) printers.  When the voter signs in at the vote center, the BOD laser printer produces a hand-markable optical scan ballot, with the appropriate choice of contests […]