News & Insights
We’re Making History in Real Time.
Our timely insights share informed perspectives on the rapidly evolving story of Election Technology, as it unfolds.
Kraken Busting and the "Most Secure Election Ever"
The November 2020 election has been called “the most secure ever,” for several good reasons, despite the fact that there is still a lot of worrisome room for improvement. Now it appears we may need to crack down on some more Kraken-wannabes before they become such.
The Case for Mobile App Voting: Can We Know the Risks to the Whole Election?
In a recent InformationWeek Dark Reading article, Kelly Jackson Higgins asks whether Internet voting by mobile app is better than other forms of Internet voting, based on better security. Rewinding to the beginning of this series: my response is, “No, App based mobile voting isn’t preferable to other forms based on security.” However, it might be preferable to other methods based on voter convenience, but there are many other factors...
National Security and “Federal Control” of Elections
Previously, our CTO, John Sebes tried to unpack the regrettable misunderstanding that current attempts to strength U.S. elections nationwide are some form of Federal hijack of states’ responsibilities for elections. And of course, he is not our corporate lawyer or anyone in Legal trying to sort this out. But from a layperson’s view (at least to Constitutional law and all) this doesn’t seem overly complicated to John, and so here’s his view....
“The Federal government should not gain more control over state elections” — Exactly Right, and Missing the Point
While at DEFCON Voting Village this week, OSET Institute CTO John Sebes observed that there is clearly more energy, more concern, and a greater sense of patriotism about defense of democracy and securing our elections than he has yet to see. And that has John thinking about how the federal government and states’ governments need to cooperate for the benefit of our democratic republic. John comments here, and in a follow-up post.
Straight Talk About Election Security Plain Talk
On June 21st the House Administration Committee held a Markup Session for HR 2722 the SAFE Act. We monitor as much of these proceedings as we can. And this one in particular compelled our CTO John Sebes to not only produce a Paper clarifying or correcting several assertions made by a House Member during that proceeding, but also led to a 7-part “plain talk” series on election security posted on our TrustTheVote Project blog. In this post here, John explains why…
The Internet and Elections: Clarifying the Conversation
With the report of comments pouring into the U.S. EAC on the next generation of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines, and all of the coverage of the issue about the role of the Internet, we feel compelled to try to simplify and straighten some things out. Even recent EAC Hearings have left the issue a bit unsettled and unclear. So, below I try to clarify where things stand as of now in hopes of clarifying the conversation about what is or isn’t.
Microsoft Wades into Election Integrity & Security with New Open Source Software Tools
The primary short-term significance of the Microsoft announcement about ElectionGuard (similar to the recent DARPA SSITH open source trusted hardware project) is validation of a major point about election cyber-security that just wasn’t part of the national conversation a couple years ago: Major technology innovation is required to increase the verifiability, accuracy, and security of elections technology and (at least) U.S. elections. That’s probably just as important as the prospect that ElectionGuard might be included in future proprietary voting system products, or in open-source election technology offerings from OSET Institute’s TrustTheVote Project or others….
A Major Breakthrough Development in the Innovation of Election Technology
On Thursday March 14th it was announced that the Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) Program has selected Galois, a premier computer science company and a security engineering partner of the OSET Institute, to develop a public prototype voting system in order to demonstrate the Program’s advancements in hardware and system security. This is an enormously pivotal piece of news in the mission to innovate election technology infrastructure to be Verifiable, Accurate, Secure, and Transparent (the “VAST mandate'“)…
New Securing the Voting Report Details Settled Consensus Except for One Major Point
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) new Report on election security released last Thursday among other things, verifies a settled consensus: a shift to all-paper-ballot elections coupled with Risk Limiting Audits. While the report makes several sound proposals, it has a significant blind spot…..
Demonizing Vendors of Voting Systems
It’s been a tough week for the incumbent commercial voting system vendors, with the leading vendor caught in some embarrassing admissions of using vulnerable antique remote-access software in their voting system product, after having previously denied exactly that. But before we hammer them too harshly, there are some reality checks to consider, suggests our CTO…
Maryland Voter Registration Glitch: A Teachable Snafu
Maryland State officials reported a computer glitch prevented the Board of Elections from updating voter registration data for as many as 80,000 voters. As a result, thousands of people may have had to cast provisional ballots if they wanted to vote in Maryland’s primary. Though accidental in nature, this is a good example of how adversaries can disrupt and discredit elections…
Repositories Update Continued: VoteStream Dominates
Today we provide another follow-up to our continuing report on our Repositories and source code development efforts. As others of the Core team have mentioned when contributing posts to the OSET blog (verses the TrustTheVote Project Blog), we appreciate the audience is diversifying over here, and want to forewarn you that parts of what follow get kinda geeky but we try to provide links for those curious to learn more. (Also Note: The TrustTheVote site is about to be re-launched within the next month, so we're trying to limit blog posts over there.) Anyway, we suspect what makes it geekish more than anything are code-names and acronyms. We’ll try to minimize the alphabet soup. OK, here we go…
A Hacked Case For Election Technology
A credible election technology company makes an incredible assertion, and the result is our CTO hot-in-pursuit of some intellectual honesty. The good news: the conversation is growing on the emerging issue of America's crumbling election technology infrastructure. The bad news: articles like the one reviewed by our CTO, particularly when published by a respectable online scientific journal create a "reality distortion field" resulting in "sound-bytes" that can mislead policy makers, politicians, and less informed pundits. Result: degradation of the signal to noise ratio and a hacked case for election technology. Read on, for a dose of intellectual honesty from our Chief election technologist...
The State of the Software Q-2 Quarterly Update
It's time for me to do catch-up on show-and-tell of the various components of open source software that are available in software repositories. This is as much an update on VoteStream as a recap of software progress we periodically provide.
How to Link Driving Records with Voting Records
Linking DMV and Voter records is not as complicated as one might assume. Our Chief Technology Officer offers some insight to the simple steps required and some comments about the effort being more about process than product.
State Certification of Future Voting Systems — 3 Points of Departure
This is a more technical post than others here given the broadening of an audience visiting this Foundation web site in search for content like this article below rather than hanging out on our more geeky Project site (which is soon to be relaunched and be way more engaging for all audiences, we're excited to report). Usually, you will find this kind of content over there, while here we'll talk more about voting experience innovations, policy matters, and progress of the Project. So, for those who are passionate about elections reform and improving the voting experience, but are not as fluent in some of the technical issues, feel free to look this over, but do not fret if seems like gobbledygook. There is more relevant stuff for your concerns to come. Ready? Here we go...
Advancing Election Data Standards: View From the Trenches
Elections data standards are essential to delivering real innovation. The annual Election Data Standards meeting opened today in Los Angeles, CA. We thought we'd give you an overview of just what in the hec this is about and why its essential to creating a voting experience that's easy, convenient, and dare we say delightful. Dry? Kinda. But a peek at the real in the trenches work we're doing. Yep.
The Moose Lurking in the Room
To hec with the elephant (regardless of who you think will control Congress after election day), the real beast in the room may be a Moose -- Alaska style. Our CTO notes an article from yesterday that points out how Alaska's close U.S. senatorial race, combined with their allowing ballots to be digitally returned across the Internet, may pose the greatest threat to a derailed election we've seen yet.
But the real point John makes is that sadly, Alaskan voters may not even be aware of the risks and who in this case is watching over their ballots -- at least those returned in the inherently insecure manner of the Internet, no matter how "secure" the "experts" are claiming the process to be. If the ballot return system in Alaska were truly as secure as their vendor claims, then Banks would be using their methods, and the massive amounts of hacked customer personal information at major brands this year might have been alleviated. Have a look and give us your take.
Three-Step Test for "Open Source"
To our elections official stakeholders, Chief Technology Officer John Sebes covers a point that seems to be popping up in discussions more and more. There seems to be some confusion about what "open source" means in the context of software used for election administration or voting. That's understandable, because some election I.T. folks, and some current vendors, may not be familiar with the prior usage of the term "open source" -- especially since it is now used in so many different ways to describe (variously), people, code, legal agreements, etc. So, John hopes to get our Stakeholders back to basics on this.
