VOTINGWORKS
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Mission Statement
Our mission is to rebuild trust in US elections. We’re a non-partisan, non-profit building secure and affordable voting equipment that delights voters.
About This Cause
Free & fair elections are the operating system of Democracy, and, in the United States, they're surprisingly complex. While Europeans typically answer one or two questions per election, Americans answer more than 20, with neighbors at the same precinct often voting on different local contests, sometimes in different languages. For more than 100 years, this complexity has led to automation, because it would take many weeks to tabulate votes by hand. This automation comes at a cost, like the butterfly ballot of Florida 2000 and the trivial hackability of the paperless touchscreen voting machines that followed. We must automate, but we must automate with care. While the US should be automating with care, existing vendors have done the opposite: the machines we use to run elections are old, insecure, and very expensive: 12 states use paperless machines where voters cannot meaningfully check their ballot. 40 states use machines that are more than 10 years old and have never been patched. Counties can’t buy enough, so lines form out the door and voters are disenfranchised. Over time, touchscreens fail, voters see their votes being flipped, and they lose trust. In 2003, spurred by Florida 2000, the Federal Government gave States $3B to upgrade. The top vendors netted big profits, the States felt a temporary reprieve, but nothing meaningful changed. Machines remain expensive, barely usable, and woefully insecure. The market for voting equipment has failed, and voters are losing trust. VotingWorks is addressing this crisis with: A non-profit model. The operating system of democracy should be publicly owned. The companies that build critical equipment that runs our Democracy should be publicly accountable. We’re a non-profit so we can rebuild trust with voters and election officials Voter-centric product design. We're product designers. We know a good product requires extensive, real user feedback. We’re deliberately starting in localities with light regulation so we can test and iterate in the real world. Every other vendor spends years developing and certifying before voters first touch their machines. We've successfully addressed feedback between an election and its runoff 3 weeks later. Off-the-shelf hardware. Existing vendors build custom hardware and plastic… all for a total market of ~100,000 machines a year. That’s ridiculous. We use off-the-shelf: (a) consumer-grade touchscreens tuned for all types of users and that work well for years, (b) laptops that rarely fail, and (c) commodity printers that handle election-day workloads without flinching. Every month, our components get cheaper. Plus, our solution benefits from built-in security advances, like secure boot, for free. Open-source software. We use open-source software -- Linux, Chromium, React, Typescript -- so we automatically inherit the reliability and security work from hundreds of thousands of open-source developers. We then focus on only the development that's specific to voting. We built a best-in-class voting user experience with 2 engineers in under 10 months. We're also building software to help states audit elections. While there is consensus that paper ballots are necessary for secure elections, the scanners that tally those paper ballots could cheat, and hand-counting is impractical. Fortunately, researchers invented a solution more than ten years ago: the Risk-Limiting Audit. A risk-limiting audit checks the work of the scanner. By randomly sampling from the paper ballots and checking them by hand against the scanner’s output, we can gain high confidence in the result. The math scales particularly well to large elections – tens of millions of votes can be audited by manually examining just hundreds of ballots – making this technique very well suited to American elections. As of 2018, however, only one state (Colorado) had ever performed a risk-limiting audit, because the software and process support has been lacking. We’re building Arlo, a modern, web-based, and open-source tool to help states conduct an audit. Arlo bridges the gap between research and practice of risk-limiting audits, and will significantly increase the public’s confidence in election results.