Formation | 2018 |
---|---|
Type | Nonprofit |
Headquarters | N/A (Virtual) |
Executive Director | Ben Adida |
Website | https://voting.works |
VotingWorks is a nonprofit organization that creates and sells open-source voting systems in the U.S. They currently have three products: one for casting and counting ballots, [1] another, named Arlo, for risk-limiting audits (RLAs), [2] and a third for accessible at-home voting.
Spenser Mestel praised VotingWorks as helping to break up the monopoly of three voting systems owned by private equity firms and bring transparency and more security to the voting process. [3] He also praised the organization for being transparent about its donors and criticized the private equity firms for not disclosing their investors. [3]
VotingWorks is a 501(c)3 founded in 2018. At the time, the next youngest election systems provider in the United States was 13 years older, with the second youngest being 40 years older. [4] Ben Adida, who helped found the organization, holds a PhD from MIT in cryptography with a focus on elections and had previously worked as the Director of Engineering at Mozilla and Square. [4] VotingWorks had a staff of 15 as of 2021. [4]
In 2019, VotingWorks piloted its election systems for vote counting in the primary and general elections in Choctaw County, Mississippi, thanks in part to a favorable regulatory environment. [5] Since then, other counties in Mississippi have signed-on and the state of New Hampshire has conducted a pilot, [1] with other counties such as San Francisco looking to work with VotingWorks. [6] New Hampshire's audit of its pilot found the software to be accurate, but the state has requested some hardware improvements. [7] [8] Officials in Mississippi have praised how easy it is to use. [3]
Risk-limiting audits have also been performed using VotingWorks' other product, Arlo, in a few states including in Georgia. [2]
Vote Casting+Counting | Risk-Limiting Audit | Accessible Vote-by-mail | |
---|---|---|---|
Illinois | ᚷ [9] | ||
Kentucky | ᚷ [9] | ||
Massachusetts | ᚷ [10] [9] | ||
Mississippi | ᚷ* [11] [5] | ||
New Hampshire | ᚷ* [1] | ᚷ [10] [9] | |
Georgia | ᚷ [12] [11] [2] | ||
Michigan | ᚷ [11] | ||
Pennsylvania | ᚷ [11] | ||
Rhode Island | ᚷ [11] | ||
Virginia | ᚷ [11] | ||
California | ᚷ* [11] | ||
Nevada | ᚷ* [11] | ||
New Jersey | ᚷ* [11] | ᚷ [9] | |
North Carolina | ᚷ* [11] | ||
Washington | ᚷ* [11] |
*select local jurisdictions (vs. statewide use)
Windham is a suburban town in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States. The population at the 2020 census was 15,817, up from 13,592 in 2010.
A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally. Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.
Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots including voting time.
Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. What exactly constitutes electoral fraud varies from country to country, though the goal is often election subversion.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002, or HAVA, is a United States federal law which passed in the House 357-48 and 92–2 in the Senate and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 29, 2002. The bill was drafted in reaction to the controversy surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election, when almost two million ballots were disqualified because they registered multiple votes or no votes when run through vote-counting machines.
Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is called canvassing.
Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verified paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. A VVPAT is intended as an independent verification system for voting machines designed to allow voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name of the candidate and symbol of the party/individual candidate. While it has gained in use in the United States compared with ballotless voting systems without it, it looks unlikely to overtake hand-marked ballots.
A DRE voting machine, or direct-recording electronic voting machine, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. These are typically buttons or a touchscreen; and they process data using a computer program to record voting data and ballot images in memory components. After the election, it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored in a removable memory component and as printed copy. The system may also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from precincts at the central location. The device started to be massively used in 1996 in Brazil where 100% of the elections voting system is carried out using machines.
End-to-end auditable or end-to-end voter verifiable (E2E) systems are voting systems with stringent integrity properties and strong tamper resistance. E2E systems often employ cryptographic methods to craft receipts that allow voters to verify that their votes were counted as cast, without revealing which candidates were voted for. As such, these systems are sometimes referred to as receipt-based systems.
An optical scan voting system is an electronic voting system and uses an optical scanner to read marked paper ballots and tally the results.
An election recount is a repeat tabulation of votes cast in an election that is used to determine the correctness of an initial count. Recounts will often take place if the initial vote tally during an election is extremely close. Election recounts will often result in changes in contest tallies. Errors can be found or introduced from human factors, such as transcription errors, or machine errors, such as misreads of paper ballots.
The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are guidelines adopted by the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) for the certification of voting systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) drafts the VVSG and gives them to the EAC in draft form for their adoption.
The 2008 New Hampshire Republican presidential primary took place on January 8, 2008, with 12 national delegates being allocated proportionally to the popular vote.
The 2012 United States presidential election in New Hampshire took place on November 6, 2012, as part of the 2012 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. New Hampshire voters chose four electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote pitting incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, Vice President Joe Biden, against Republican challenger and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and his running mate, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan.
A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is a post-election tabulation auditing procedure which can limit the risk that the reported outcome in an election contest is incorrect. It generally involves (1) storing voter-verified paper ballots securely until they can be checked, and (2) manually examining a statistical sample of the paper ballots until enough evidence is gathered to meet the risk limit.
California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO) is a non-profit organization that works with community members and voting officials to develop open source voting systems for use in public elections. In addition, CAVO provides training and education to election officials for the effective employment of open source voting technologies and management practices. Utilizing proprietary software and hardware, current voting systems have been reported as being riddled with shortcomings and "...affected by critical flaws" in testing, certification, accuracy, accessibility, and security, while exhibiting a lack of transparency and conflicts of interest. CAVO 's intent is to develop secure and transparent voting systems to ensure accurate vote counts coupled with the utmost in security by utilizing free open source software and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) commodity components.
An election audit is any review conducted after polls close for the purpose of determining whether the votes were counted accurately or whether proper procedures were followed, or both.
The Verified Voting Foundation is a non-governmental, nonpartisan organization founded in 2004 by David L. Dill, a computer scientist from Stanford University, focused on how technology impacts the administration of US elections. The organization's mission is to "strengthen democracy for all voters by promoting the responsible use of technology in elections." Verified Voting works with election officials, elected leaders, and other policymakers who are responsible for managing local and state election systems to mitigate the risks associated with novel voting technologies.
Election cybersecurity or election security refers to the protection of elections and voting infrastructure from cyberattack or cyber threat – including the tampering with or infiltration of voting machines and equipment, election office networks and practices, and voter registration databases.
An open-source voting system (OSVS), also known as open-source voting, is a voting system that uses open-source software that is completely transparent in its design in order to be checked by anyone for bugs or issues. Free and open-source systems can be adapted and used by others without paying licensing fees, improving the odds they achieve the scale usually needed for long-term success. The development of open-source voting technology has shown a small but steady trend towards increased adoption since the first system was put into practice in Choctaw County, Mississippi in 2019.