Dr. Joey Dodds gave the talk “Trustworthy Elections” at ENIGMA 2020.
ENIGMA, a USENIX-sponsored conference, is described as the “Ted Talks” of the cybersecurity community.
Joey’s presentation focused on the two main techniques that the community has been focusing on to make elections more trustworthy: Risk-Limiting Audits (RLA) and End-to-End Verifiability (E2E-V).
Free & Fair’s public work on RLA’s goes back several years. We created the OpenRLA Assistant, and open source single-precinct RLA tool (akin to Voting Works’s Arlo tool) about five years ago. We formalized the basics of RLAs in the Coq logical framework several years ago. And we created the world’s first multi-jurisdiction RLA tool, the Colorado Risk-Limiting Audit (CORLA) system, three years ago for the State of Colorado.
Likewise, Free & Fair’s public work on E2E-V goes back much farther. We audited several purported E2E-V internet voting systems as far back as about a dozen years ago, we helped with some of the design ideas and tooling around Verificatum, an excellent crypto library focusing on E2E-V, and we created ElectionGuard for Microsoft. In particular, we implemented all of the core cryptography for the SDK (in C) as well as the sample ElectionGuard Verifier (in Rust).