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,
another, named Arlo, for
risk-limiting audits (RLAs),
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.
He also praised the organization for being transparent about its donors and criticized the private equity firms for not disclosing their investors.
Organization
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.
Ben Adida, who helped found the organization, holds a PhD from
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...
in cryptography with a focus on elections and had previously worked as the Director of Engineering at
Mozilla
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...
and
Square
In geometry, a square is a regular polygon, regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal si ...
.
VotingWorks had a staff of 15 as of 2021.
Adoption
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.
Since then, other counties in Mississippi have signed-on and the state of New Hampshire has conducted a pilot,
with other counties such as San Francisco looking to work with VotingWorks. New Hampshire's audit of its pilot found the software to be accurate, but the state has requested some hardware improvements.
Officials in Mississippi have praised how easy it is to use.
s have also been performed using VotingWorks' other product, Arlo, in a few states including in Georgia.
select local jurisdictions (vs. statewide use)
See also
*
Civic technology
Civic technology, or civic tech, is the idea of using technology to enhance the relationship between people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and commu ...
*
Electoral fraud
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 o ...
References
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Voting in the United States
Open source projects
Voting
Election technology companies
Electronic voting companies