VotingWorks - modern, nonpartisan, nonprofit, opensource voting infrastructure we can all trust.

“The vote is precious. It is almost sacred. It’s the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democratic society and we’ve got to use it.”?

John Lewis, August 24, 2013

Sometimes doing the simple, obvious thing is the most important and powerful.

The American public paid little attention to voting technology until the 2000 election in Florida with its hanging chads, at which point, thankfully, everyone agreed punchcards had to go. Then, in 2004, Democrats worried about voting machines in Ohio, and again in 2016 in Michigan and Wisconsin. And of course, in 2020, Republicans worried about voting machines in Georgia. We all learned that these voting machines - central to our democracy - are built by private companies, the interests of which were ultimately profits, all operating particularly secretly.

Whatever you think about the validity of those concerns, one thing is clear: trust in voting equipment has never been this low, and public scrutiny and questions about voting technology have never been this intense.

One might argue that we need to focus on overhauling or eliminating the outdated electoral college which was originally created for reasons which are now completely irrelevant.? Since 1800, over 700 proposals have been submitted to eliminate or reform the electoral college.? The closest came in the early 1970’s with the Bayh-Celler amendment. While I’d love to see the electoral college eliminated in favor of a popular majority - the fact that it’s been so difficult to change/eliminate over the past 200 years leads me to believe that we need to look at more immediate changes that could have a big impact.

I believe a simple focus on upgrading to modern, open-source voting machines that are built, maintained, and enhanced by a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization is a straightforward change that could massively increase confidence in our voting infrastructure, make the jobs of our election officials much easier, and, perhaps most importantly, remove the reasonable concerns associated with proprietary, privately developed machines/infrastructure.??

In this new era of hyper-partisan mutual distrust, we need a new generation of voting machines that everyone can trust. Paper ballots, of course. But also voting technology with a modern security architecture, so it’s really hard/almost impossible to hack. Voting software that is simple and fail-safe, so human mistakes are caught and mitigated automatically. And most importantly, voting technology that is open-source, so everyone can understand how it works.

I have been inspired by the work of Ben Adida, the founder of VotingWorks. ? VotingWorks is a tech non-profit that has built the only open-source voting machine in the world.? Paper ballots, counted by electronic tabulators, never connected to the Internet, with all software publicly available today. They’re already deployed in Mississippi and New Hampshire. They’re already helping calm voters’ fears, letting the people return to debating the real policy issues that matter for our future.

For democracy’s sake, we need voting equipment that’s as transparent as the incredible public servants that run our elections. We need VotingWorks to be adopted broadly across our country as a key fundamental component of the solution to our challenges with voting infrastructure.