This Briefing provides many recommendations on the path forward in a post-HAVA world, including discussions of policy, funding, the voting experience, election technology development, and enhancing voter confidence. This work is primarily intended for policy professionals, legislators, election officials, and security professionals; however, it is an easy read for anyone interested in how to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes.

This Briefing presents a survey of racism in election administration, finding that it is systemic and without any quick fixes possible. However identifying and recognizing the challenges first is the only pathway to solutions ….

Finally, the second edition of the widely-read “Critical Democracy Infrastructure Briefing,” nineteen months in development has arrived. While the second edition benefited from many developments since the first edition in September 2017, with a historical election less than 6 months away, the Institute wrapped up research, and brought this edition to production as quickly as possible.

The second edition picks up where the first concluded, incorporating progress in legislation, states efforts, and cybersecurity developments. The content was reorganized and updated for easier reading. This edition restructures background content into three Appendices summarizing the process of elections, explaining election infrastructure, and providing an overview of critical infrastructure. The key development for this second edition, backed by over two years of the critical infrastructure designation implementation and formation of corresponding efforts to treat election infrastructure as critical infrastructure assets, is the development of a fresh set of recommendations in Section 4. Read on for a Foreword from William P. Crowell, former Deputy Director of the NSA, and for access to the full briefing…

Elections are the principal mechanism of representative government and remain the most powerful method of democratic participation in the U.S. today. However, voter confidence in the system is waning, while the costs to secure an inherently vulnerable election infrastructure have become a difficult issue of runaway federal funding. Simultaneously solving for both: increasing the security of elections, while lowering the cost of the same appears to be a considerable challenge. But maybe not, if we avoid allowing the obvious to escape us. This paper proposes an innovative solution worthy of discussion: an all-by-mail federal ballot. Such would represent the first major innovation in national elections since the advent of the (unfortunate) touchscreen ballot machine. To be sure, an “all-by-mail” federal ballot would not be without questions and challenges. However, the cost savings could be enormous compared to the status quo, while the attack surface and threat model would tremendously shrink. Its worth consideration and that’s what this paper is intended to do.

This work has been in development for over a year, and was originally ready for publication in early February. However, the COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed a nation, and we paused. Now with the likelihood of needing to massively expand Vote-By-Mail for November, there is no better or worse time than now to release this paper. Nothing proposed in this paper is actionable for 2020, but it is ripe for conversation about how we move forward. Unfortunately, we can be sure this will not be the last national emergency to threaten the operational continuity of our democracy. Read on for that introduction and link to this significant paper — all 53 pages, 99 footnotes and 78 references to make the case….

In a recent blog series on our corporate web site (“Challenging Times at America’s Election Assistance Commission”) we explored how the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (“EAC” or “Agency”) appears to be in danger of compromising its standing with its NIST technical advisors and elections officials, by over-promising and under-delivering. The Agency needs to address necessary programmatic changes to combat the glacial pace of standards updates and the high costs of voting system testing and certification.

In the future it will be imperative that the VVSG 2.0 federal certification program support rapid changes to voting technology, at a pace faster than the last two decades have experienced. This is particularly urgent given a rapidly changing threat environment where foreign nation-state actors are attempting to interfere with our nation’s very sovereignty. That is precisely what motivates us to write this position paper, in a spirit of constructive commentary.

The purpose of this Briefing is to shed light on the process of how voting systems are purchased, deployed, and updated, with a special emphasis on the challenges that currently inhibit updates. We hope that by illuminating what all of this means for election administrators, vendors, and the nation as a whole, policy makers can better understand what needs to change to ensure the security of the nation’s election infrastructure in the future.  This Briefing strives to do just that, led by our Global Director of Technology Development, Eddie Perez whose 15 years direct experience in all of this should be of value to readers.

When the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2002 little thought was given to the sources and methods of potential “attacks” on public elections.  The focus 15 years ago was primarily on clearly ascertaining and protecting voter intent.  At the time, the thinking was that computers can easily and reliably do that.  No one was contemplating “digital attack vectors” on what would be the new machinery of elections. That has all changed. The truth is, today this administrative computing segment, severely lagging behind the majority of Government I.T., has a growing blind spot.  Accordingly, it is past time to rethink testing and certification.  The OSET Institute takes a position on that topic in this Paper led by our Global Director of Technology Development, Eddie Perez.

It is well settled that current Voting System Technology (VST) is not considered “trustworthy” by definition in a secure computing context, because of its basis on commodity Personal Computing (PC) hardware and Operating Systems (OS) software that does not support trustworthy computing. Of all the voting systems in use for U.S. federal, state, and local elections (as well as for elections in other democracies), none were designed and developed using “trusted computing” concepts and principles that have been used for decades in high-security computing for government critical systems. 

This paper presents a new architecture of next generation voting system technology and represents the underlying principles of the ElectOS voting system. Aside from our visual tour of ElectOS (under-going refinement now), this paper, which is a significant revision of our original draft in June 2010, represents the most important narrative for the underlying design thinking of the ElectOS voting system.

All parties to voting systems procurement transactions have an imperative duty to focus on acquisitions that maximize security and integrity, lower costs for taxpayers, and ensure that elections conducted on such equipment are verifiable, accurate, secure and transparent in process.  When the Institute observes unusual deviation from this compelled practice, it must be called out and examined. The State of Georgia’s current legislation and efforts to acquire new voting technology for the 2020 election is emerging as a vexing case that cannot and should not be ignored.

The Institute’s Global Director of Technology Development, Edward Perez, himself a 15-year veteran of the commercial voting and election administration technology industry, recently noted the extent to which the Georgia Secretary of State’s Elections Division is proceeding to drive a specific acquisition that defies the logic and warnings of the super majority of computer scientists, election technology and security experts, and election integrity professionals. Why is that? This Briefing examines the costing model for this acquisition in attempt to catalyze exploring an answer.

The Russian government’s cyber operations during the 2016 U.S. election brought to the forefront the idea of “cyber-terrorism,” a bandied-about term with no clearly agreed-to definition.

In this Essay, Joy London a senior member of the leadership team at the OSET Institute, in the office of legal counsel and focused on international development, delivers what we believe is a brief but important commentary on the issue of how to characterize digital attacks on election technology infrastructure. This paper takes a U.S. perspective, but we believe has international applicability, where more has been written on this timely topic.

This Briefing summarizes the current state of commercial offerings for hybrid marking devices and Printed Vote Records; identifies concerns and design challenges reflected in current implementations; presents principles and guidelines for future PVR development; identifies areas in need of additional research; and concludes with high-level considerations about differences between traditional hand-marked ballots and machine-marked Printed Vote Records. Edward Perez a senior member of the leadership team at the OSET Institute delivers what we believe are important considerations to catalyze conversation, as we work to help better defend democracy, principally by increasing trust and confidence in elections and their outcomes.