Center for Voting Technology Research (VoTeR)

In exercising their right to vote, the US citizens increasingly have to rely on the electronic voting technology. Since Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was signed into law in 2002, an overwhelming majority of voting districts has been deploying electronic voting equipment for use by their constituents. Coming from a number of different manufacturers, the electronic voting equipment in use today forms a quite diverse landscape of offerings. As in other cases of newly developed technology, the current industry practices fall short of providing adequate reliability and dependability, in turn leading to questionable or nonexistent guarantees regarding the integrity and security of electronic voting systems.

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Securing Our Elections Matters

Since 2006, the VoTeR Center has invested very extensively in the development of comprehensive auditing of equipment used in the elections and in the design of safe election procedures. Starting in 2008 the Center has performed technological audits and assisted in the hand-counted audit procedures in all statewide elections in Connecticut, doing this in a cost-efficient and robust manner. Our goals are to ensure the integrity of the election outcomes conducted with electronic voting systems and to continuously assess the security and dependability of such systems.

Below are sample reports, publications and challenges of modern day voting that we have been able to report on. We encourage you to view these publications, analyze and most importantly ask questions. What can be done better? Can we secure further our elections? What are the challenges ahead?

Sample Reports and Publications

• Electronic Poll Book Systems as Distributed Systems: Requirements and Challenges – 2015-Seattle-4s.pdf
• A Systematic Approach to Analyzing Voting Terminal Event Logs – evt14.pdf
  2014 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE’14), August 18-19, 2014, San Diego, CA, USA
• Scaling Privacy Guanrantees in Code-Verification Elections
  E-Voting and Identify, 4th International Conference (Vote-ID 2013), July 17-19, 2013, Guildford, UK
• Computer Assisted Post Election Audits – AS-2013.pdf
  State Certification Testing of Voting Systems National Conference, June 20-21, 2013, Harrisburg, PA, USA
• Malicious Takeover of Voting Systems: Arbitrary Code Execution on Optical Scan Voting Terminals – abstract-acmsac2013.pdf
  28th Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC 2013), March 18-22, 2013, Coimbra, Portugal

Read Our Publications and Reports