Category Archives: voting

Problems with Georgia’s Voter Registration Portal

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It’s possible to cancel other people’s voter registrations:

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts…

…the portal suffered at least two security glitches that briefly exposed voters’ dates of birth, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and their full driver’s license numbers—the exact information needed to cancel others’ voter registrations…

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On Secure Voting Systems

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Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but it’s general in nature.

From the executive summary:

We believe that no system is perfect, with each having trade-offs. Hand-marked and hand-counted ballots remove the uncertainty introduced by use of electronic machinery and the ability of bad actors to exploit electronic vulnerabilities to remotely alter the results. However, some portion of voters mistakenly mark paper ballots in a manner that will not be counted in the way the voter intended, or which even voids the ballot. Hand-counts delay timely reporting of results, and introduce the possibility for human error, bias, or misinterpretation…

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Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy

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Last month, I convened the Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2023) at the Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center. As with IWORD 2022, the goal was to bring together a diverse set of thinkers and practitioners to talk about how democracy might be reimagined for the twenty-first century.

My thinking is very broad here. Modern democracy was invented in the mid-eighteenth century, using mid-eighteenth-century technology. Were democracy to be invented from scratch today, with today’s technologies, it would look very different. Representation would look different. Adjudication would look different. Resource allocation and reallocation would look different. Everything would look different, because we would have much more powerful technology to build on and no legacy systems to worry about…

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AI and Lossy Bottlenecks

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Artificial intelligence is poised to upend much of society, removing human limitations inherent in many systems. One such limitation is information and logistical bottlenecks in decision-making.

Traditionally, people have been forced to reduce complex choices to a small handful of options that don’t do justice to their true desires. Artificial intelligence has the potential to remove that limitation. And it has the potential to drastically change how democracy functions.

AI researcher Tantum Collins and I, a public-interest technology scholar…

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2022 Election Not Impacted by Chinese, Russian Cyber Activity: DOJ, DHS

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Hackers, including from Russia and China, launched cyberattacks and collected information, but it did not impact the integrity and security of the 2022 US election.
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Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol

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Interesting analysis:

This paper discusses the protocol used for electing the Doge of Venice between 1268 and the end of the Republic in 1797. We will show that it has some useful properties that in addition to being interesting in themselves, also suggest that its fundamental design principle is worth investigating for application to leader election protocols in computer science. For example, it gives some opportunities to minorities while ensuring that more popular candidates are more likely to win, and offers some resistance to corruption of voters…

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AI and US Election Rules

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If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns (even more) off the rails.

At issue is whether candidates using AI to create deepfaked media for political advertisements should be considered fraud or legitimate electioneering. That is, is it allowable to use AI image generators to create photorealistic images depicting Trump hugging Anthony Fauci? And is it allowable to use …

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Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System

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Online voting is insecure, period. This doesn’t stop organizations and governments from using it. (And for low-stakes elections, it’s probably fine.) Switzerland—not low stakes—uses online voting for national elections. Andrew Appel explains why it’s a bad idea:

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 problem of malicious insiders in their printing office by officially declaring that they won’t consider that threat model in their cybersecurity assessment…

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Deepfake Election Interference in Slovakia

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Well designed and well timed deepfake or two Slovakian politicians discussing how to rig the election:

Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, during which media outlets and politicians are supposed to stay silent. That meant, under Slovakia’s election rules, the post was difficult to widely debunk. And, because the post was audio, it exploited a loophole in Meta’s manipulated-media policy, which …

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Political Disinformation and AI

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Elections around the world are facing an evolving threat from foreign actors, one that involves artificial intelligence.

Countries trying to influence each other’s elections entered a new era in 2016, when the Russians launched a series of social media disinformation campaigns targeting the US presidential election. Over the next seven years, a number of countries—most prominently China and Iran—used social media to influence foreign elections, both in the US and elsewhere in the world. There’s no reason to expect 2023 and 2024 to be any different…

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