Re: Timely message on Internet voting from MIT expert Ron Rivest

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To the contrary, Lou, the current Secretary of State and his office continue to make progress on audits and promoting transparency, despite the crossfire in various frustrating battles about other issues.

The audits that we've done in Boulder over the last 7 years continue to improve, and have sparked successive improvements in state audit laws, and a large grant from the EAC to work on them.  I'm part of that grant.  The risk-limiting audit law, slated for implementation statewide in 2014, is, according to the top auditing expert Dr Philip Stark of Berkeley, "the best audit law in the world" despite its flaws, which they're working on.

The entire Best Practices and Vision Commission invited Philip to talk on Dec 14, and it was excellent.  You can get his slides from
 http://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/election/BestPractices/bestPractices.html
and listen to the audio there also.

The commission liked what they heard, and the SoS office is quickly moving in the direction of focusing on certifying elections via audits rather than imagining that certifying any particular election system will guarantee that it will get the right results in practice.  And also leveraging open source software for vote tabulation among other things.

Check it out, and help make it better!

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 11:59:12AM -0700, Lou Puls wrote:
> Hi Margit,
> 
> Thanks for for the timely message from one of the world's most renowned
> encryption experts.  His recommendation reminds me of Paul Walmsley's proposal
> many years ago to the CFVI group of Boulder that sampling audits with
> hand-counting be demanded of the machines promoted to the gullible County
> Commissioners.
> 
> Right now I'm wondering if our illustrious (notorious?) Secretary of State is
> in the least concerned that all the Microsoft-dependent DREs will be anywhere
> near provided with the latest updates and vulnerability patches before being
> locked down for the elections?  I seriously doubt it, and doubt if there's any
> kind of credible way of proving it.
> 
> Lou
> 
> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Margit Johansson <margitjo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>     Hi All,
>     In this short readable message, Prof. Rivest relates Internet voting and
>     the larger Internet security picture. Check Wikipedia for his
>     qualifications.
>     Cheers,
>     Margit
> 
>     Margit Johansson
>     Coloradans for Voting Integrity (CFVI)
> 
>     ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>     From: Ronald L. Rivest <rivest@xxxxxxx>
>     Date: Sun, Dec 18, 2011 at 3:36 PM
>