Building a Voting Machine Everyone Can Trust

Voting is a particularly complicated field. Every citizen gets one vote, ballots must be secret, and the tally must be fair. In the United States, due to the complexity of our ballots, we must use electronic tabulation equipment, and the problem thus becomes even harder. Over the last seven years, at VotingWorks, we've been building an open-source voting machine for US elections. We've learned a few key lessons in what it takes to build a voting machine everyone can trust. In some ways, these lessons are deeply surprising: though good security practices are obviously necessary for trust, they are very far from sufficient.