Over the last several years, EFF has strongly opposed the use of closed, unverifiable voting technologies, bringing litigation to investigate faulty machines and challenge bad practices as well as backing legislation that would move us towards more trustworthy elections. For 2008, EFF is making a new contribution to help keep track of election issues, technology-related or otherwise.
In the 2008 Primary season, EFF successfully tested a beta version of Total Election Awareness (or "TEA"), a web-based application designed to help election monitoring efforts collect and analyze election-related incidents in real time. The first field test took place on February 5th — "Super Tuesday". Working with the Election Protection Coalition, TEA helped volunteers staffing Election Protection call centers (866-OUR-VOTE) in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to record over 2,200 incidents and inquiries from voters from across the country. This week, TEA recorded the details of another 600 calls in the Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. primaries.
The next phase in the project development is preparing the tool for use in the November general election. In addition to improving the quality of the data recorded as part of the Election Protection process, we're also planning to make the November data available to the public in real time. Moreover, TEA is being developed as a free open-source project so other election monitoring efforts, large or small, will be able to use the tool themselves once it's released.
Pcapdiff is a tool developed by the EFF to compare two packet captures and identify potentially forged, dropped, or mangled packets. Two technically-inclined friends can set up packet captures (e.g. tcpdump or Wireshark) on their own computers and produce network traffic between their two computers over the Internet. Later, they can run pcapdiff on the two packet capture files to identify suspicious packets for further investigation. See Detecting packet injection: a guide to observing packet spoofing by ISPs and EFF's Test Your ISP Project for more background.
Pcapdiff 0.1 is written in Python, is run from the command line, and requires the pcapy Python library. It should run on any OS where those two things are available. This is an early release of the software; more features and bug fixes are expected in the future.
