voting
On Secure Voting Systems
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 ...
Second Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy
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 ...
AI and Lossy Bottlenecks
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 ...
Security Analysis of a Thirteenth-Century Venetian Election Protocol
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 ...
AI and US Election Rules
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 ...
Security Vulnerability of Switzerland’s E-Voting System
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 ...
Political Disinformation and AI
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 ...
December’s Reimagining Democracy Workshop
Imagine that we’ve all—all of us, all of society—landed on some alien planet, and we have to form a government: clean slate. We don’t have any legacy systems from the US or ...
Buying Campaign Contributions as a Hack
The first Republican primary debate has a popularity threshold to determine who gets to appear: 40,000 individual contributors. Now there are a lot of conventional ways a candidate can get that many ...
Large Language Models and Elections
Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee released a video that it claims was “built entirely with AI imagery.” The content of the ad isn’t especially novel—a dystopian vision of America under ...
