In October 2020, Free & Fair wrote a proposal for Tusk Philanthropies for their Mobile Voting Project RFP.
Our proposal is called Revitalizing Elections with Verifiable Internet Voting for the United States, or REVIVUS for short.
Here are the first few lines of REVIVUS‘s executive summary:
Free & Fair proposes to lead a team of world-renowned, internationally recognized and respected experts in the first constructive phase of attempting to create an end-to-end verifiable Internet voting (E2E-VIV) platform. Phase 1 focuses on defining the precise, measurable, independently verifiable requirements for such a system.
Other critical sentences on the first page of the proposal:
Since this project is widely recognized in the R&D community as a Grand Challenge Project, we must define precise and measurable project milestones so that we know where we are heading and how to determine whether we have reached our destination. We must precisely describe both desired and undesired outcomes. These outcomes are especially critical, as we must be able to compare and contrast this new kind of voting with traditional voting, whether it be vote-at-home or voting in-person at a polling place.
The creation of an actionable, computable risk and threat model is especially critical to these comparisons, as it is a fundamental input into system design and implementation decisions. Such a model must be based upon peer-reviewed from-the-field data and be frank about the threats to our democracy and voting processes posed by adversaries, foreign and domestic.
While we were not funded to work on this project, we are still keeping in touch with Tusk Philanthropies and those entities funded to develop an E2E-VIV platform, the OSET Institute and Assembly Voting.
You can find the REVIVUS proposal, and other proposals and responses we have written, in Free & Fair’s Transparency GitHub project.