The Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life hosted a discussion titled “Voting Machines Everyone Can Trust,” led by Dr. Ben Adida, co-founder and executive director of VotingWorks on Wednesday. Adida spoke about the history of voting machines, current voting practices and his approach to building the next generation of voting machines.
After earning his Ph.D. from MIT’s Cryptography and Information Security Group, Adida spent 12 years managing various engineering companies, with a focus on security and privacy. Adida founded VotingWorks in 2018 as a nonpartisan nonprofit.
VotingWorks supplies the only open-source voting system used in the United States, meaning the software’s source code is publicly accessible on the VotingWorks website. The company’s voting technology has been adopted in several counties across Mississippi and New Hampshire, and its audit software is used in 10 states.
Adida opened his talk by reminding the audience that although voting technology can always be improved, the voting machines being used in this election are still secure.
“We don’t do that for any other technology. We don’t say, ‘Hey, my car has lane departure warnings. Well, that’s it. I can’t drive my car anymore,” he said.
Beginning conceptually, Adida posed the question: “What’s so hard about voting?”
“We need your individual vote to be a secret from everyone, but we also need the election results to be trusted by all citizens,” Adida explained. “That’s what makes voting so hard, trying to resolve those tensions.”
Adida then spoke on why voting machines are needed at all. He acknowledged that voters tend to have the most trust in hand-counted votes. However, he also explained that the lack of uniform contests on U.S. ballots makes voting machines necessary.
“Houston once had a 96-contest ballot, and so when you think about the combinatorics of counting paper ballots with 96 contests on them, you can start to see how that’s hard,” Adida explained.
Despite voting technology being necessary to mitigate the challenges of managing complex ballots, Adida maintained that paper ballots are still necessary.
“If the record of your ballot is electronic, … there’s some software between you and the official record of your vote,” Adida said. “The nice thing about a paper ballot, [besides] that it’s been checked by the voter, is it can be recounted and audited.”
After establishing a conceptual framework around voting, Adida pivoted to how VotingWorks machinery can help provide fair and trusted elections in the U.S.
He explained that paper ballots and tabulation audits are not enough to optimize election security and focused on three areas where voting practices could be improved: technology, physical security of voting machines and transparency.
Voting technology failures may go unnoticed if they do not significantly impact election outcomes. When failures are suspected, auditing allows for mistakes to be corrected. Adida argued that an over-reliance on audits is problematic.
“Two weeks later you’re gonna run an audit and go, oops, never mind, we had a silent failure and actually this person’s president now,” he said. “That’s unacceptable. Public trust would be shattered by a system like that.”
VotingWorks’ machinery solves this problem by detecting potential errors early. For example, if a VotingWorks ballot is altered, the unique hash of its QR code will be destroyed, resulting in the machine rejecting the ballot. This prevents the faulty ballot from being counted.
“You’re going to have failures in your system,” Adida said. “You should build a voting system such that when [things] happen, you catch it really early.”
VotingWorks technology also increases the physical security of voting machines. Adida explained how the machines are unlocked by something similar to a bank card in terms of security.
“Is it perfect? No,” Adida said. However, he said that quick security checks would allow them to place more trust in their voting system. “But [If I said], ‘Well, let me do this quick 30-second check on the machine [and it checks out]’ you can be pretty confident you don’t have to trash that machine? Yes.”
The final issue addressed by VotingWorks machines is transparency. VotingWorks offers open-source code which means that their operating code and the names of engineers responsible for writing and approving each component are publicly available for inspection.
“I think of it like an open-kitchen restaurant,” Adida explained. “You walk in and you see the folks making your food. … Chances are they’re less likely to go from raw [meat] to cooked and back without cleaning their knives because people are watching. … There’s a bit of a higher bar that we hold ourselves to when we do our work in public.”
The demonstration of Adida’s machine showcased its exclusive card access, the ejection of faulty ballots and the ease of the machine’s operation. The audience enjoyed a short wait to submit their tester ballots due to the machine’s quick processing speed.
After the talk, the Daily spoke with Adida, who expressed optimism about the future of voting machines amid the heightened public scrutiny surrounding elections.
“We have to keep staying ahead,” he said. “It’s a process with absolute layers of defense, and each layer is imperfect, but together, it’s pretty hard for folks to hack the system.”
