Joe Kiniry

Politico | Colorado on Monday said it will become the first state to regularly conduct a sophisticated post-election audit that cybersecurity experts have long called necessary for ensuring hackers aren't meddling with vote tallies. The procedure — known as a “risk-limiting” audit — allows officials to double-check a sample of paper ballots against digital tallies to determine whether results were tabulated correctly. The election security firm Free & Fair will design the auditing software for Colorado, and the state will make the technology available for other states to modify for their own use.

The Hill | The state of Colorado is moving to audit future digital election results, hiring a Portland-based startup to develop software to help ensure that electronic vote tallies are accurate. The startup Free & Fair announced on Monday that it had been selected by the state to develop a software system for state and local election officials to conduct what are called “risk-limiting audits.”

Colorado has chosen Free & Fair to build a risk-limiting audit (RLA) system to be used statewide beginning with the November 2017 general election.

We have replied to number of RFPs and RFIs in recent months, including Geneva, Switzerland's E2E Internet Voting System RFP, Canada's Voting Services Modernization/Polling Place Process Enhancement RFI, Los Angeles County's Voting System Assessment Project (VSAP) RFI, and Colorado's Risk Limiting Audit DQ.

As the Senate Intelligence Committee's hearing on Russian Interference in the 2016 U.S. Elections brings concerns about election cybersecurity further into public view, security experts have been sounding the alarm behind the scenes for years to elected officials and federal agencies

SC Magazine | Several security vulnerabilities in systems used to manage Georgia's election technology, exposing the records of 6.7 million voters months before the nation most expensive House race slated for June 20, has raised the fears that the election could be disrupted.

Texas Monthly | Revelations that Russian hackers tried to break into Dallas County’s web servers, likely with the intention of accessing voter registration files, in the lead up to last November’s election renewed concerns about Texas election security. Both Wednesday night’s news out of Dallas and a Bloomberg report on Monday—which said that the Russian hacking attempts affected 39 states—are forcing states to look inward and re-examine the security of their local and state-level electoral technologies.

Design Automation Engineer Leior Varon has been poking around at Free & Fair recently and has offered to reflect on what he’s been learning. Varon has a background in electrical engineering, but became interested in F&F’s use of formal methods in software system design. So, in order to get his feet wet in this world, Varon spent 6 weeks creating and implementing the formal specifications for Qubie, our Poll Queue Monitor. Here are his reflections.

USA TODAY | Russian military hackers said to have infiltrated the U.S. election system would have had several potential avenues to influence U.S. elections — including by tampering with voting rolls, interference that could have had an important impact in swing states. Whether or not this happened isn't outlined in a leaked National Security Agency report that led to the arrest Monday of a federal contractor with top-secret security clearance. There has been no evidence votes were changed in the 2016 presidential election, though officials in North Carolina are actively investigating attempts to compromise the state's electronic poll book software.

Free & Fair is committed to releasing all our products, research, development, and proposals under open source licenses. Our primary focus is creating open source, high assurance election systems that are great for our customers. Our secondary focus is helping others create high assurance election systems using the concepts, tools, and techniques within our research field.

As such, today, on Wednesday, 17 May 2017, we are opening to the public more than 30 repositories in our Free & Fair GitHub Organization. These repositories contain the product demonstrators, security audits, proposals, tools, and technologies that we use to create high assurance election systems, some of which have been under development since the late 1990s.