Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Anticipating Voting Machine Failures in November

A new report sniffs out the states that are likeliest to have problems with their electronic voting machines.

Electronic voting machines don’t seem to have gotten as much media attention as they did before the presidential elections in 2004 and 2008, when researchers documented disturbing computer-security flaws and other kinds of failures in the machines (See “E-Voting’s Biggest Test”). But the issue remains. Recently an exhaustive report (summary here, full PDF report here) showed in detail which states are best situated to deal with voting machine breakdowns—because they have paper backups, for example—and which are not. The authors, who are from the Verified Voting Foundation, the Rutgers Law School Constitutional Litigation Clinic, and Common Cause, followed the methodology used in a similar report four years ago. In the new study, they argue:

“On November 6, 2012, it is highly likely that some voting systems will fail in counties across the country … [A]s the technology used for elections has become more complicated, the possibility of error has increased substantially.”

Keep Reading

Most Popular

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.