Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections

With the intention of assisting legislators, election officials and the public to make sense of recent literature on post-election audits and convert it into realistic audit practices, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California Berkeley) convened a blue ribbon panel (the "Audit Panel") of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and several of the nation's leading election officials. Following a review of the literature and extensive consultation with the Audit Panel, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Clinic make several practical recommendations for improving post-election audits, regardless of the audit method that a jurisdiction ultimately decides to adopt

Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots

Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. The PDF files were downloaded, converted to TIF images, and posted on the PERFECT website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization. The accuracy and robustness of a method based on both index-marks and oval targets are demonstrated on 13,435 challenged ballot page images

The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost

This report is the final product of the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of electronic voting systems in the United States. It comes after nearly two years of study with many of the nations leading academics, election officials, economists, and security, usability and accessibility experts.Up until this point, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of voting systems in the areas of security, accessibility, usability, and cost. The result is that jurisdictions make purchasing decisions and adopt laws and procedures that have little to do with their overall goals.The Brennan Center analysis finds that there is not yet any perfect voting system or set of procedures. One system might be more affordable, but less accessible to members of the disabled community; certain election procedures might make the systems easier to use, but they compromise security. Election officials and community members should be aware of the trade-offs when choosing one voting system or set of procedures over another, and they should know how to improve the system they choose.Included in this full report is an executive summary of the Brennan Centers analysis of voting system security, voting system usability, as well as voting system accessibility and cost.The Brennan Center analysis of cost is in part based upon a review of voting system contracts provided by jurisdictions around the country and a cost calculator [no longer available]. The cost calculator and contracts should assist jurisdictions in determining the initial on ongoing costs of various voting systems

Documentation Assessment of the Diebold Voting System

The California Secretary of State commissioned a comprehensive, independent evaluation of the electronic voting systems certified for use within the State. This team, working as part of the “Top to Bottom” Review (“TTBR”), evaluated the documentation supplied by Diebold Election System, Inc

The Right to Participate, the Right to Know, and Electronic Voting in Montana

Electronic Votin