Transparency
Every TrustVoting article filed under Transparency.
28 articles
Two democracies, opposite answers on voting computers
Germany looked at a voting computer and asked: can every citizen check this? Estonia asked: can we make voting easier?…
What a fully verifiable election would actually feel like to a voter
What would it actually feel like to vote in a system you could verify yourself — not by trusting an official, but by…
When one company builds, runs, and vouches for the vote
On August 2, 2017, the company that built Venezuela's voting machines told the world — publicly, in plain English —…
Open-source voting is necessary — and still not enough. Here's the rest.
LA County spent a decade building the world's most transparent voting system — open-source, publicly owned,…
The paperless voting machine: a receipt-less transaction with democracy
In Sarasota County in 2006, 18,000 votes vanished into machines that left nothing to recount. A federal court in 2020…
Reproducible builds: proving the software running is the software you inspected
Switzerland published its voting source code so anyone could inspect it — and researchers immediately found a hidden…
The 'public' in public elections: a legal idea worth reviving
In 2009, Germany's highest court ruled that if ordinary citizens can't check the vote count themselves—without…
'Certified' means it passed a test once. It doesn't mean it's safe today.
A security review cleared the system. Then outside researchers found the flaw—while 280,000 people were already voting.…
Why voting online is so much harder than banking online
Your bank lets you check every transaction. Your vote disappears by design — and the moment someone tries to fix that,…
Not all paper trails are equal: the receipt you can read vs. the one you can't
You voted. The machine printed a receipt with your choices—and a barcode you cannot read. A federal court confirmed:…
'Verifiable' is a word politicians love. Here's what it actually has to mean.
Kenya's Supreme Court annulled a presidential election not because fraud was proven, but because no one—not a judge,…
When the voting-machine company itself says: don't trust these numbers
In 2017, the company that built Venezuela's voting machines told the world the official turnout figure was a lie — by…
India kept its voting machines — but tightened the paper check. Why?
India's Supreme Court refused to scrap its voting machines — then immediately ordered stronger paper seals and…
You can't read the barcode that counts your vote. A federal court noticed.
Your ballot prints human-readable text — but the scanner ignores it and reads a barcode you cannot decode. A federal…
The hanging chad and the standard nobody had written down
Florida 2000 didn't fail because of fraud — it failed because nobody had written down what a half-punched hole in a…
What if the public, not a vendor, owned the software that counts your vote?
Los Angeles County built the first publicly-owned, open-source vote-counting system certified in California — and it…
Brazil dares the public to attack its voting machines — on purpose
Brazil's election court doesn't just certify its voting machines — it publishes the rules and dares the public to break…
A mathematical 'proof' the votes were counted right — with a secret backdoor built in
Switzerland published its e-voting source code so anyone could check it — and within weeks, cryptographers found a…
280,000 people had already voted online before anyone noticed the hole
During a live election with 280,000 votes already cast, two researchers found a flaw the official security review had…
They opened the internet-voting pilot to the public. It fell in 48 hours.
A university team broke into Washington D.C.'s internet voting pilot, changed every ballot, and made the server play a…
The world's most famous online-voting system, taken apart by researchers
Independent researchers watched Estonia's celebrated internet voting system run a live national election — and…
Ireland bought a national e-voting system, then couldn't prove it worked
Ireland spent millions on voting machines that sat in a warehouse for five years, then got scrapped — because an…
The system caught it — and it still took five years nobody could watch
In 2020, thousands of fabricated voter-registration forms hit one Michigan county. The guardrails held — no fake voter…
The country that un-invented the voting computer
In 2007, a Dutch government commission asked a simple question: can an ordinary citizen verify that a voting computer…
Germany's top court: if only an expert can check the count, it isn't a real election
Germany's highest court ruled in 2009 that if understanding an election result requires a computer science degree, it…
A voting machine is a computer. "Certified" doesn't mean you can trust it
In 2004, Ireland spent millions on voting machines it never used—because an independent commission couldn't prove they…
The scariest attacker already has the keys
The people who copied Georgia's entire voting system weren't hackers who broke in — they were let through the front…
Open-source voting: necessity, not hype
The software counting your vote is a secret — and the officials asking you to trust it have no way to prove it's doing…