Making Elections More Trustworthy (and trusted)

Matt Blaze, Georgetown University

Abstract:
From voter registration to tallying ballots to reporting results, technology – computers and software – plays a central role in almost every aspect of US elections. Information technology has become essential for managing the US’s complex elections, and, when all goes well, provides great benefits in efficiency, accuracy, and usability. But computers and software are also notoriously (and fundamentally) unreliable and vulnerable to tampering, and the systems we use for voting and election management are no exception. In some ways, the integrity of election outcomes has become dependent on the integrity of technology that may not always work as intended. Can we trust election outcomes? Should we?

Fortunately, recent advances have found reliable methods for conducting high-integrity elections even with flawed (or malicious( technology. This talk will examine the technologies used in elections, the ways they can fail, and practical safeguards that mitigate risks they introduce.

Bio:
Matt Blaze, Ph.D., is a professor of law at Georgetown Law and a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. For more than 25 years, Blaze’s research and scholarship has focused on security and privacy in computing and communications systems, especially as we rely on insecure platforms such as the internet for increasingly critical applications. His work has focused particularly on the intersection of this technology with public policy issues. For example, in 2007, he led several of the teams that evaluated the security of computerized election systems from several vendors on behalf of the states of California and Ohio.