Applied Miscellany

Last week I posted a short overview of Ron Rivest’s ThreeBallot voting system paper. In his weblog, Ed Felten has begun a discussion about issues related to write-in candidates.
At first, I didn’t think the issue of write-in candidates was much of a problem. An approach for write-ins would be to slightly mechanize the process. [...]

Ron Rivest has posted a fascinating paper called The ThreeBallot Voting System. This paper describes a paper-based, low-tech, three-part voting system. Each voter actually marks three identical ballots. To vote FOR a candidate in a race, they mark exactly 2 of the 3 ballots. To vote AGAINST a candidate in a [...]

Today, Ari Feldman, Alex Halderman, and Ed Felten of Princeton University posted their security analysis of a Diebold AccuVote-TS electronic voting machine. This type of voting machine was used in several elections yesterday.
Electronic voting machines are basically repackaged personal computers that run election software. The researchers exploited significant flaws in the hardware, software, and [...]