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December 2018

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Georgia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey…on my mind

By Luther Weeks on December 21, 2018

Story in Atlanta Journal-Constitution outlines what keeps election integrity awake all night: Georgia prepares to move from electronic to paper ballots .

State lawmakers broadly agree that it’s time to replace Georgia’s 27,000 direct-recording electronic voting machines with a system that leaves a verifiable paper trail.

With a paper ballot, recounts and audits could verify the accuracy of electronic tabulations.

But there’s disagreement about what kind of paper-based voting system Georgia should use and how much taxpayer money to spend on it…

It would be a sad shame if state and Federal money is spent to buy such risky equipment at triple the cost of voter marked paper ballots.

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Handmarked paper ballots more verifiable than ballot marking devices

By Luther Weeks on December 11, 2018

New study The study What Voters are Asked to Verify Affects Ballot Verification: A Quantitative Analysis of Voters’ Memories of Their Ballots

As a practical matter, do voters verify their BMD-printed ballot cards, and are they even capable of it?  Until now, there hasn’t been much scientific research on that question…

  1. In a real polling place, half the voters don’t inspect their ballot cards, and the other half inspect for an average of 3.9 seconds (for a ballot with 18 contests!).

  2. When asked, immediately after depositing their ballot, to review an unvoted copy of the ballot they just voted on, most won’t detect that the wrong contests are presented, or that some are missing.

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Blockchain a technology with great claims, without documented success

By Luther Weeks on December 5, 2018

Blockchain has been wildly mis-sold, but underneath it is a database with performance and scalability issues and a lot of baggage. Any claim made for blockchain could be made for databases, or simply publishing contractual or transactional data gathered in another form.

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76 Bad ballots, followed by unfortunate decision for election integrity

By Luther Weeks on December 2, 2018

Rep. Philip Young, D-Stratford, won re-election to a second term on Nov. 6, defeating Republican Jim Feehan by 13 votes in the 120th District. But Feehan says as many as 76 voters at Bunnell High School were given ballots for the 122nd District, which uses the same polling place.

Ruling from the bench, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis dismissed Feehan’s request for a new election, agreeing with the attorney general’s office that she had no jurisdiction to do so under the Connecticut Constitution, lawyers for Feehan and Young said.

“That power has been committed exclusively to the House of Representatives, and this Court therefore lacks jurisdiction to grant the relief that Feehan requests,” the attorney general’s office said in a brief filed Thursday.

 

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