FRS 125: Election Machinery

Princeton
University

Freshman Seminar 125
Election Machinery
Andrew W. Appel

Fall 2004

Directory
General Information | Schedule and Readings | Assignments

Items marked with a bullet are required readings.

September 13: Election protocols

Tutorials & Commentary by Douglas W. Jones:

September 20: Electronic voting machines in the news

Reading:

Machine Politics, a Wired News Special Collection, wired.com/news/evote, 2000-2004. (There are at least 78 articles here. I suggest you read them in chonological order, that is, in the reverse of the order they're listed.)
Black Box Voting: Vote Tampering in the 21st Century, by Bev Harris (Plan Nine Publishing, 2003).
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, April 7, 2004.
Optional reading: Diebold Learns What Edison Knew: Voting Machine Sales Are Tough, Bloomberg.com, September 1, 2004.

September 27: Political machines

Field Trip to Mercer County Superintendant of Elections: Depart at 1:30. Agenda: Registration Department; Investigation Department; Board of Elections. Explanation of voter-registration procedures, absentee ballot procedures, provisional ballots. Demonstration of Sequoia electronic voting machine. Inspection of old Shoup lever machine. Inspection of optical scan machine used by Board of Elections for absentee ballots. Sample Sequoia printout, top half and bottom half.

The Shame of the Cities by Lincoln Steffens. Published 1904; reprinted by various publishers, 1957, 1993, etc.
Rainbow's end : Irish-Americans and the dilemmas of urban machine politics, 1840-1985, by Steven P. Erie (University of California Press, 1988).

October 4: Vote Fraud

Ed Kessler will visit and discuss his experiences as a polling-place challenger in Newark, 1970 (Addonizio versus Gibson); and his personal observation of vote fraud in Jersey City in the first half of the 20th century.

The Cleanup of New Jersey, The Nation 217 (2), pp. 38-44, July 16, 1973. alternate link
Newark vote requires a cast of hundreds, The Star-Ledger, May 10, 2002.
Other newspaper articles that you find (see the homework assignment).

October 11: Analysis of electronic voting machines

Dan Wallach will talk about:

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System by Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, Aviel D. Rubin, and Dan S. Wallach, In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Oakland, CA, May, 2004.
Hack-a-Vote: Security Issues with Electronic Voting Systems, by Jonathan Bannet, David W. Price, Algis Rudys, Justin Singer, and Dan S. Wallach. IEEE Security and Privacy 2 (1), January-February 2004.

October 18: Voter-verified paper ballots; Cryptographic protocols and trust

Visit by Kevin Chung, president of Avante International Technology, Inc., a maker of electronic voting machines.

Coin flipping by telephone, a protocol for solving impossible problems. Manuel Blum, ACM SIGACT News 15 (1), Winter-Spring 1983, pp. 23 - 27.
Chapters 6 and 7 (and appendix J) of The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh (Doubleday, 1999).
Digital Signatures, from ``Mathematical Models in Public-key Cryptology'' by Joel V. Brawley and Shuhong Gao, Applied Mathematical Modeling (D. R. Shier and K. T. Wallenius, Eds.), Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, 2000, p. 115--136.
Reflections on Trusting Trust, by Ken Thompson, Communications of the ACM, 27(8) 761-763, August 1984.

Optional reading: Coin toss applet in Java

October 25: Midterm break week

Instituted in 1972 upon the demand of the undergraduates, so they could go home and campaign for their candidates.

November 1: The Secret Ballot

Turnout and Rural Corruption: New York as a Test Case, by Gary W. Cox and J. Morgan Kousser, American Journal of Political Science 25 (4), Nov. 1981, pp. 646-663.
Participação da Urna Eletrônica Brasileira no Concurso das Mais Estúpidas Medidas de Segurança, http://www.brunazo.eng.br/voto-e/PIcontest/, by Amílcar Brunazo Filho and Pedro Dourado Rezende, 2003. (Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 are in English.)

November 8: The 2004 Election

Read the newspapers and the web between November 1 and November 8, bring in all the good stuff you can find.

November 15: Security Engineering

Security Engineering, by Ross Anderson, Wiley, 2001. Chapters 1-3, 4.4, 5.1-5.3, 5.7, 9-12, 14-15, 18, 19.5.3, 23.

November 22: NJ Voting Machines Lawsuit

We will have a visit from Penny Venetis, Clinical Professor of Law at Rutgers University.

Read the following documents from Gusciora v. McGreevey: Complaint, Appel certification, Defendants' Brief, Defendants' exhibits B, C, D, E, P, Q, R, S, HH, Plaintiffs' reply brief, Appel supplemental certification.

November 29: Gerrymandering

The Great Election Grab: When does gerrymandering become a threat to democracy? by Jeffrey Toobin. The New Yorker, December 8, 2003.
Extension of Remarks, Legislative Studies Section, American Political Science Association 27 (2), July 2004.

Optional reading:
Elbridge Gerry's Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution, by Gary W. Cox and Jonathan N. Katz, Cambridge University Press, 2002.

December 6: Cryptography

Security Engineering, Chapter 5. Read all except 5.2.7 and its subsections. See also the assignment for December 6th.

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Freshman Seminar 125 Election Machinery Andrew W. Appel