Free & Fair will be joining The Christian Science Monitor’s Passcode division and Wombat Security Technologies during the annual conference & festival that celebrates the convergence of the technology, film, and music industries. Free & Fair team members will be on hand at the CSM-Passcode/Wombat booth from Sunday, March 12 through Tuesday, March 14.
SXSW attendees will get a chance to participate in a mock election simulating one or more of the standard ways we vote today—and will vote in the near future—in the United States. But, there’s a catch. There is also a powerful adversary watching (played by another attendee complete with optional bad guy mask!) who gets to try to manipulate votes. Free & Fair team members will explain the pros and cons of different technologies, and the kinds of vulnerabilities many voting machines contain.
Attendees can also learn the basics of Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs), which are a simple yet powerful way to check whether votes have been counted as cast. Actual audits will be conducted to help participants understand why RLAs should be a regular part of the voting process. Free & Fair team members will discuss RLAs in relation to the current recount laws in the USA, as well as to other forms of post-election audits based upon physical evidence.
Free & Fair provides Open Source elections systems meeting the same high reliability and security standards that the US federal government demands for national security. Our goal is to usher in a new era of provably secure elections, and to help election officials escape the never-ending treadmill of replacing chronically insecure systems that quickly become obsolete or expensive to maintain.