The Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology

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During the 2016 presidential election, America's election infrastructure was targeted by actors sponsored by the Russian government. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy examines the challenges arising out of the 2016 federal election, assesses current technology and standards for voting, and recommends steps that the federal government, state and local governments, election administrators, and vendors of voting technology should take to improve the security of election infrastructure. In doing so, the report provides a vision of voting that is more secure, accessible, reliable, and verifiable.

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180 pages · 6 x 9 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-47647-X
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-47648-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/25120

Suggested citation

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Neal Kelley

Neal Kelley is Registrar of Voters for Orange County, California, the fifth largest voting jurisdiction in the United States, serving more than 1.6 million registered voters.

He joined the County as Chief Deputy Registrar of Voters in 2004. In his role as the County’s chief election official, he leads an organization responsible for conducting elections, verifying petitions and maintaining voter records.

Prior to joining Orange County, Kelley developed and grew several companies of his own, employing hundreds of people from 1989 to 2004. He was also an adjunct professor with Riverside Community College’s Business Administration Department, and served as a police officer in Southern California during the mid 1980's.

In 2009 Kelley earned professional election certification through the national Election Center and Auburn University as a Certified Elections and Registration Administrator (CERA). He has been the recipient of several awards for election administration, including recognition from the California State Association of Counties, the Election Center and the National Association of Counties. He was recently honored with the "2015 Public Official of the Year" from the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks.

Kelley is an appointed member of the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Board of Advisors (and currently serves as Chairman) and the EAC Voting Systems Standards Board, is the past president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials (CACEO), and is the immediate past president for the National Association of County Recorders, Election Officials and Clerks (NACRC).

Kelley earned a Bachelor of Science degree in business and management from the University of Redlands and an M.B.A. from the University of Southern California.

Lee C. Bollinger

Lee C. Bollinger is the nineteenth President of Columbia University. A prominent advocate of affirmative action, he played a leading role in the twin Supreme Court cases—Grutter v Bollinger and Gratz v Bollinger—that upheld and clarified the importance of diversity as a compelling justification for affirmative action in higher education. A leading First Amendment scholar, he is widely published on freedom of speech and press, and currently serves on the faculty of Columbia Law School.

From November 1996 to 2002, Mr. Bollinger was the President of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he had also served as a law professor and dean of the Law School.

Mr. Bollinger serves as the chair of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a director of the Washington Post Company and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He is also a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Widely published on legal and constitutional issues involving free speech and press, Mr. Bollinger’s books include: Eternally Vigilant: Free Speech in the Modern Era; Images of a Free Press; The Tolerant Society: Freedom of Speech and Extremist Speech in America; and Contract Law in Modern Society: Cases and Materials. In January 2010, his most recent work, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century, was published by Oxford University Press.

Mr. Bollinger has received the National Humanitarian Award from the National Conference for Community and Justice and the National Equal Justice Award from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for his leadership on affirmative action. He also received the Clark Kerr Award, the highest award conferred by the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, for his service to higher education, especially on matters of freedom of speech and diversity. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees from universities in this country and abroad.

After graduating from the University of Oregon and Columbia Law School, where he was an Articles Editor of the Law Review, Mr. Bollinger served as law clerk for Judge Wilfred Feinberg on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and for Chief Justice Warren Burger on the United States Supreme Court. He joined the University of Michigan Law School faculty in 1973.

Michael A. McRobbie

Michael A. McRobbie is the 18th president of Indiana University. Dr. McRobbie joined IU in 1997 as vice president for information technology and chief information officer, and was appointed vice president for research in 2003. He was named interim provost and vice president for academic affairs for Indiana University’s Bloomington campus in 2006, and became president the following year.

In addition to his duties as president, Dr. McRobbie serves on several outside committees and organizations. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher specializing in U.S. foreign policy and international affairs. He is a member and former chair of the Board of Trustees of Internet2 and chair of the Board of Directors of the Digital Preservation Network. He is a member and former chair of the Big Ten Council of Presidents and Chancellors, and a member of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board, and a member and former chair of University Research Associates, which is responsible for Fermi Lab.

Dr. McRobbie is also a member of the board of directors of the Indiana University Health system—one of the largest and most highly regarded hospital systems in the U.S.—and the OneAmerica insurance company, based in Indianapolis.

Dr. McRobbie also holds faculty appointments in computer science, philosophy, cognitive science, informatics, library and information science, and computer technology, and has been an active researcher in information technology and logic over his career. He has been the principal investigator on several major grants, has published a number of books, many articles, and has served on numerous editorial boards and conference committees.

A native of Australia, Dr. McRobbie received a Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1979, and has honorary doctorates from the University of Queensland (2007); Sung Kyun Kwan University in Korea (2008); the Australian National University (2010); the South East European University in Macedonia (2011), which IU helped found; and Griffith University in Australia (2014). In 2013, Thailand's National Institute for Development Administration awarded him its Prince Naradhip Bongsprabandha Plaque for services to international education.

He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012 and is an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. In 2007, he was made a Sagamore of the Wabash, the highest honor the State of Indiana can bestow on a private individual. And, in 2010, he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia, Australia’s national honors system. In 2012, he was listed as one of America's 10 most popular university presidents.

Andrew W. Appel

Andrew W. Appel is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. He served as Department Chair from 2009-2015. His research is in software verification, computer security, programming languages and compilers, and technology policy. He received his A.B. summa cum laude in physics from Princeton in 1981, and his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985. He has been Editor in Chief of ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems and is a Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). He has worked on fast N-body algorithms (1980s), Standard ML of New Jersey (1990s), Foundational Proof-Carrying Code (2000s), and the Verified Software Toolchain (2010s). He is the author of several scientific papers on voting machines and election technology, served as an expert witness on two voting-related court cases in New Jersey, and has taught a course at Princeton on Election Machinery.

Josh Benaloh

Josh Benaloh is Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft Research, an affiliate faculty member of the University of Washington, and an elected Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. He holds an S.B. in Mathematics from MIT and M.S., M. Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University where his 1987 doctoral dissertation “Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections” introduced the use of homomorphic encryption as a paradigm to enable election tallies to be verified by individual voters and observers without having to trust election equipment, vendors, or personnel.

Dr. Benaloh has published and spoken extensively on cryptography, policy, and election technologies. He is an author of the widely-covered 2015 “Keys Under Doormats” report which explores the technical implications of restrictions on cryptography and helped influence the ongoing political debate. He is also an author of the 2015 U.S. Vote Foundation report on the viability of end-to-end verifiable Internet voting systems. Outside of elections, policy, and technology, Dr. Benaloh recently completed two years as chair of the Sound Transit Citizen Oversight Panel which oversees the Seattle regional transit authority that is currently investing over $1 billion per annum on new infrastructure. He has also authored numerous puzzles used in Seattle-area competitions.

Karen S. Cook

Karen Cook is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology and Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Stanford University. She is also the Director of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) at Stanford and a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation. Professor Cook has a long-standing interest in social exchange, social networks, social justice and trust in social relations. She has edited a number of books in the Russell Sage Foundation Trust Series including Trust in Society (2001), Trust and Distrust in Organizations: Emerging Perspectives (with R. Kramer, 2004), eTrust: Forming Relations in the Online World (with C. Snijders, V. Buskens, and Coye Cheshire, 2009), and Whom Can Your Trust? (with M. Levi and R. Hardin, 2009). She is co-author of Cooperation without Trust? (with R. Hardin and M. Levi, 2005). In 1996, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2007 to the National Academy of Sciences. In 2004 she received the ASA Social Psychology Section Cooley Mead Award for Career Contributions to Social Psychology.

Dana DeBeauvoir

Dana DeBeauvoir is the Travis County Clerk. She has always been inspired by public service. Her interest led her to obtain a Master’s Degree from the LBJ School of Public Affairs and ultimately to run for public office. Since her election as County Clerk in 1986, Ms. DeBeauvoir has devoted herself to bringing high ethical standards, effective and cost efficient management practices, the benefits of new technology, and high quality customer service to the office of the County Clerk. The Clerk’s Office has a wide range of responsibilities including the conduct of elections; the filing and preservation of real property records; and the management of civil, probate, and misdemeanor court documents.

Moon Duchin

Moon Duchin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics and serves as founding Director of the interdisciplinary Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University. Her mathematical research is in low-dimensional topology, geometric group theory, and dynamics. She leads a research team called the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group (MGGG) that studies novel applications of geometry and topology to redistricting problems. One of the first public activities of the MGGG will be a summer school in August 2017 bringing together scholars from law, civil rights, and mathematics to train expert witnesses for voting rights cases. Duchin is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and holds a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to study geometry at the intermediate scale between metric spaces and their asymptotic limits. She has lectured widely in pure mathematics and has spoken on the geometry of redistricting to audiences from high schools to a rabbinical school to the Distinguished Lecture Series of the Mathematical Association of America. She holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago and a BA in Mathematics and Women's Studies from Harvard University.

Juan E. Gilbert

Juan E. Gilbert is The Banks Preeminence Chair in Human-Centered Computing and Chair of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida where he leads the Human Experience Research Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Gilbert is the inventor of Prime III, an open source, secure and accessible voting technology that has been used in numerous organization elections and recently in Statewide elections in New Hampshire.

Susan L. Graham

Susan L. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She received an AB in mathematics from Harvard University and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. Her research has spanned programming language design and implementation, software tools, software development environments, and high-performance computing.

Dr. Graham has served on numerous advisory and visiting committees and has been a consultant to a variety of companies. She was a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 1997 to 2003. She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005. She was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 2001 to 2007 and was President in 2006-2007. Dr. Graham was a founding member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium, serving first as vice-chair and then as chair. From 2013 to January 2017 she was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) where she co-chaired their study and report “Big Data and Privacy: A Technological Perspective.” She is a member of the Harvard Corporation (formally, a Fellow of Harvard College).

Kevin Kennedy

Kevin J. Kennedy left government service on June 29, 2016 with the dissolution of the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board. He presently consults and speaks on issues and topics related to campaign finance, elections and ethics.

Kennedy served as Director and General Counsel for the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (G.A.B.) from November 5, 2007 through June 29, 2016. Before assuming the top staff position for the G.A.B., he was Executive Director – and before that Legal Counsel – for the Wisconsin State Elections Board.

Kennedy served as Wisconsin’s Chief Election Official from August 17, 1983 until June 29, 2016. No other individual has served longer in that capacity. Under his leadership, Wisconsin has been consistently recognized as a leader and innovator in the administration of elections, lobbying and campaign finance.

In addition to his service to the people of Wisconsin, Kennedy has been active in a number of professional organizations. He has testified before Congress, several federal and state legislative bodies as well as numerous private organizations active in the fields of campaign finance, elections, ethics and lobbying.

Nathaniel Persily

Nathaniel Persily is the James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, with appointments in the departments of Political Science and Communication. Prior to joining Stanford, Professor Persily taught at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and as a visiting professor at Harvard, NYU, Princeton, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of Melbourne. Professor Persily’s scholarship and legal practice focus on American election law or what is sometimes called the “law of democracy,” which addresses issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance, redistricting, and election administration. He has served as a special master or court-appointed expert to craft congressional or legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland, Connecticut, and New York, and as the Senior Research Director for the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. In addition to dozens of articles (many of which have been cited by the Supreme Court) on the legal regulation of political parties, issues surrounding the census and redistricting process, voting rights, and campaign finance reform, Professor Persily is also coauthor of the leading election law casebook, The Law of Democracy (Foundation Press, 5th ed., 2016), with Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela Karlan, and Richard Pildes. His current work, for which he has been honored as an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, examines the impact of changing technology on political communication, campaigns, and election administration. He has edited several books, including Public Opinion and Constitutional Controversy (Oxford Press, 2008); The Health Care Case: The Supreme Court’s Decision and Its Implications (Oxford Press 2013); and Solutions to Political Polarization in America (Cambridge Press, 2015). He received a B.A. and M.A. in political science from Yale (1992); a J.D. from Stanford (1998) where he was President of the Stanford Law Review, and a Ph.D. in political science from U.C. Berkeley in 2002.

Ronald L. Rivest

Ronald Rivest is Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a leader of the Cryptography and Information Security research group within MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He received a BA in Mathematics from Yale University in 1969, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974.

He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a founder of RSA Data Security. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has served as Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and of the Financial Cryptography Association. He has also worked extensively in the areas of computer algorithms, machine learning, and VLSI design.

Charles Stewart, III

Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, where he has taught since 1985, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research and teaching areas include elections, congressional politics, and American political development.

Since 2001, Professor Stewart has been a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, a leading research effort that applies scientific analysis to questions about election technology, election administration, and election reform. He is currently the MIT director of the project. In addition, he is the director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, a new initiative to disseminate scientific analysis of election processes among academic researchers and election practitioners. Professor Stewart is an established leader in the analysis of the performance of election systems and the quantitative assessment of election performance. Working with the Pew Charitable Trusts, he helped with the development of Pew’s Elections Performance Index. Professor Stewart also provided advice to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. His research on measuring the performance of elections and polling place operations is funded by Pew, the Democracy Fund, and the Hewlett Foundation. He recently published The Measure of American Elections (2014, with Barry C. Burden).

His current research about Congress touches on the historical development of committees, origins of partisan polarization, and Senate elections. His recent books of congressional research include Electing the Senate (2014, with Wendy J. Schiller), Fighting for the Speakership (2012, with Jeffery A. Jenkins), and Analyzing Congress (2nd ed., 2011).

Professor Stewart has been recognized at MIT for his undergraduate teaching, being named to the second class of MacVicar Fellows in 1994, awarded the Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and the recipient of the Class of 1960 Fellowship. From 1992 to 2015, he served as Head of House of McCormick Hall, along with his spouse, Kathryn M. Hess.

Professor Stewart received his B.A. in political science from Emory University, and S.M. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Webinar

Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology - Will Our Votes be Counted and Secure in 2020?: A Webinar

September 23, 2020

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM (EDT)

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About

This webinar brought together former members of the Committee on the Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology to discuss national and local voting issues including voting accessibility and election results auditing. The committee issued, in 2018, the National Academies' report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy.

View video of the event at https://vimeo.com/showcase/7627002.

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Is it a Closed Session event?

Not Closed

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Dominic LoBuglio

(202) 334-2402
cstl@nas.edu

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It is essential to the National Academies mission of providing evidence-based advice that participants in any of our meetings or events avoid political or partisan statements or commentary and maintain a culture of mutual respect. The statements and presentations during our meetings or events are solely those of the individual participants and do not necessarily represent the views of other participants or the National Academy of Sciences, which is a non-partisan, tax exempt organization that includes under its Charter the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Medicine, and that operates the National Research Council.

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The Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology

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Dominic LoBuglio

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The Future of Voting: Accessible, Reliable, Verifiable Technology

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Featured publication

Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy

Description

Contributors

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Contact us

Provide feedback

Request materials

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Review of the draft United by Nature assessment

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