Verified Voting Foundation

David L. Dill's research involves "circuit verification and synthesis and in verification methods for hard real-time systems".[3] Part of this work has required him to testify on "electronic voting before the U.S. Senate and the Commission on Federal Election Reform".[3] These interests ultimately led him to establishing the Verified Voting Foundation in 2003.

The Verified Voting Foundation has established a partnership with the Election Protection Coalition; they act as a resource to help voters with registering to vote, finding their polling place, absentee voting, and informing voters about election tools used at their polling site. This is done through hotline services, digital aids, and on the field volunteer work.[4] The Verified Voting Foundation also provides the public with information and resources about the electoral process and practices across the country.[5]

The Verified Voting Foundation acts a non-governmental advocacy group that attempts address what they see as a voter security issue by pressuring government officials to prioritize election reform in favor of their belief of "best practices".[6] The 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida was a trivial event that forced officials to improve vote accuracy and "raised concerns about how Americans vote".[7] The punch card voting method used in Florida did not provide the accurate vote count for the state; which ultimately played a crucial role in who as elected as president. This event sparked George W Bush to sign the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) a year later.[8] HAVA helped fund states to improve their voting systems and practices by requiring states to meet new standards, accessibility requirements, and protocols (outlined in the legislation) in their electoral process.[9] States like Florida, Georgia, and Maryland have used HAVA to be proactive in reforming their ballot tactics in that suited their state's practices.[7] For instance, activist groups in Maryland, associated with the Verified Voting Foundation, continue to advocate for a "voter-verifiable receipt or switch to paper ballot" with its current online voting tactics.[7] Other states like Idaho, California, Arizona, Illinois and Pennsylvania have been slower to react and change their voting habits.[7] The implementation of HAVA created new debates for the democratic process like: “voter identification, provisional balloting, absentee voting, and paper ballots”.[9] The Verified Foundation's volunteer and research work attempts build off the work from HAVA to encourage their perspective on what constitutes necessary voting changes for states to ensure vote accuracy.[9] In December 2019 allegations of impropriety by Verified Voting resulted in the resignation of board members. These board members Phillip Stark and Richard Demillo resigned after alleging Verified Voting was pushing the sale of election systems they knew to be faulty and that Verified Voting was acting out of duty and relationship with proprietary software interests.

Since 2004, Verified Voting has been collecting data on the nation’s voting machines and making it available through a web-based interactive tool called “the Verifier.” The Verifier is the most comprehensive publicly available set of data related to voting equipment usage in the United States.[10][11] For each federal election cycle, the Verifier documents the specific voting equipment in use in every jurisdiction across the country. The Verifier is used by election officials, academics, organizations, the news-media, and general public as a source of information about voting technology.[12][13] Since its inception, the Verifier has supported a number of initiatives including national election protection operations, state advocacy, policy making, reporting, and congressional research inquiries.[14][15] To maintain the database, Verified Voting liaises with election officials, monitors local news stories, and researches certification documents. The Verifier is a critical aspect of Verified Voting's organizational infrastructure and supports the responsible use of technology in elections.

Verified Voting advocates for the use of voter-verified paper ballots that “create tangible and auditable records of votes cast in an election.” Paper trails generated by voter-verified paper ballots “provide a reliable way to check that the computers were not compromised (whether through human error or malfeasance),” an important point given that 99% of all ballots cast in the United States are counted by a computer.[16] Verified Voting advises state and local jurisdictions to help them “implement best practices for election security.” The organization advocates that election officials avoid using electronic voting systems which do not provide a paper trail.[17]

Verified Voting plays a leading role in providing states and localities with the information, expertise, and advice needed to make informed decisions about the voting equipment they use and purchase. In 2019 and 2020, the organization offered feedback on the adoption of new voting machines in California, New York, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, as well as other states, advocating in all instances for the use of voter-verified paper ballots.[18][19][20][21][22]

Verified Voting works diligently to highlight risks of online voting and recommends that state and local governments avoid adopting these technologies.[23] The organization argues that elections held online would be “easy targets for attackers.”[24] Online voting, which includes voting on a mobile app, lacks the capacity to generate a voter-verified paper record and cannot protect a voter’s privacy or the integrity of their ballot.[25] Verified Voting notes that unlike other online services, election manipulation is difficult to catch because ballot secrecy prevents voters from seeing their ballots after they have submitted them, which also prevents voters from determining if their votes have been digitally altered or not. A 2016 report co-authored by the organization concluded that “as states permit the marking and transmitting of marked ballots over the Internet, the right to a secret ballot is eroded and the integrity of our elections is put at risk.”[26]

The organization notes that with mobile voting, there is no way to determine the security of “the actual device that voters cast their votes on...The voter’s device may already be corrupted with malware or viruses that could interfere with ballot transmission or even spread that malware to the computer at the elections office on the receiving end of the online ballot.”[27] Online technologies that rely on blockchain technology faces a similar challenge: Verified Voting argues that while “blockchain technology is designed to keep information secure once it is received,” such technology “cannot defend against the multitude of threats to that information before it is entered in the blockchain.” Moreover, blockchain technology prevents voters from anonymously verifying their ballot, and presents risks to “ballot secrecy if encryption keys are not properly protected or software errors allow decryption of individual ballots.”

A wide variety of systems propose using cryptography to provide a digital audit trail to either augment or replace a paper audit trail. Most prominently, these are end-to-end (E2E) auditable voting systems. The idea for such a design goes back to the early 1980s. A number of directors and advisors to the Verified Voting Foundation have worked on designing such systems, however the Foundation has no public unified stance on these systems. Instead, it often notes these systems are primarily research-focused and not commercially deployed at the present time.

Since the release of Bitcoin in late 2008, a second set of cryptographic systems propose using Bitcoin's underlying blockchain technology to provide election integrity.[28] These systems may or may not be end-to-end verifiable. The use of a blockchain is considered by the Foundation to be insufficient for protecting elections. Voter verifiability is a major security requirement of voting, which is not solved by blockchain[29] Europe is developping an eIDAS compatible framework named the European Self-Sovereign Identity Framework (ESSIF), which potentially addresses this verifiability issue.