Position Paper: Reinventing the U.S. Election Assistance Commission
Edward Perez, Global Director of Technology Development
Gregory Miller, COO & Principal Election Technology Analyst
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.
To achieve the goal of protecting the nation’s critical democracy infrastructure, the EAC must re-invent itself by assessing and understanding its mistakes of the past. Indeed, we believe this organizational self-reckoning is a far more important issue than substantive questions concerning, for example, specific functional requirements for auditability, barcodes, or wireless technologies. If the organizational dynamics of the EAC continue to prevent functional requirements from being incorporated into voting technology that reaches the market in timely fashion, then updated requirements will not matter. In short, the inner-workings of the Agency and its certification program must stop inhibiting necessary change. The status quo is not acceptable.
With this context, this Position Paper presents recommendations for how the EAC can achieve increased agility and flexibility in three areas that are necessary if a re-invented EAC is to meet our national security needs:
Accelerating the standards-setting process;
Reinventing the certification process; and
Motivating vendors to advance their technology, through renewed incentives and restrictions.
We emphasize that the OSET Institute recognizes and earnestly supports a strong, effective, U.S. Election Assistance Commission.
That is precisely what motivates this position paper, in a spirit of constructive commentary, offered by our Global Director of Technology Development, Eddie Perez whose 15 years direct experience in all of this should be of value to readers, and our Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer Gregory Miller whose 13 years experience in researching and developing new election technology architectures and standards, and 27 years of technology sector experience including considerable work in open standards development should also be of value.
