The Election Verification Network 2023 Annual Conference will be held March 15-17 in Washington DC at the Kellogg Conference Center at Gallaudet University.
Join us for a stimulating and timely conference that will also feature keynote speeches on the top election security issues. Attendance at EVN 2023 is by invitation. Please contact us for more information.
The conference will be held Wednesday, March 15 – Friday, March 17 8:15am to 5:30pm at the Kellogg Conference Hotel at Gallaudet University, 800 Florida Avenue, NE, Washington, DC 20002 (Google Maps)
This program may be subject to change
Download the program agenda (PDF)
8:15am Breakfast/Check-in – Ballroom
8:45am Opening Remarks – Ballroom
Josh Benaloh– Microsoft Research– Chair, EVN CoCo
Gowri Ramachandran, The Brennan Center for Justice, Conference Chair
9:30am Working Together to Improve Voting Accessibility
Moderator: Hazel Millard, Brennan Center for Justice
Panelists: Mia Ives–Rublee, Disability Justice Initiative, Center for American Progress; Dr. Raja Kushalnagar, Gallaudet University; Sharon Laskowski, National Institute of Standards and Technology
This panel will focus on how administrators, election security advocates, and disability rights experts can work together to improve access to voting and elections for voters with disabilities. The conversation will touch on the barriers that limit full participation in our democracy for people with disabilities and on how technological innovation can be used to improve accessibility.
10:30am Break – Atrium
10:45am Recent Evaluations of Internet Voting and Electronic Ballot Return
Moderator: Audrey Malagon, Virginia Wesleyan University
Panelists: Greg Miller, OSET Institute; Stephanie Singer, Campaign Scientific; Maurice Turner, Election Integrity Advocate
Balancing security and accessibility in remote voting continues to be a pressing issue for the election security and administration community. In the past year, reports have been released discussing electronic ballot return methods, including one from the Government Blockchain Association and one from the University of California, Berkeley. Panelists will summarize key takeaways from those reports and add their own expertise on remote voting methods.
12:00pm Annual EVN Awards
2023 EVN Awards Committee: John Marion, Common Cause, Chair; Edgardo Cortes, Brennan Center for Justice; Liz Howard, Brennan Center for Justice;
Christine Walker, Jackson County, Oregon
1:00pm Lunch – Ballroom
2:15pm Colorado’s Groundbreaking RLAs: Experiences and Future Steps
Panelists: Harvie Branscomb, Coloradans for Voting Integrity; Matt Crane, Colorado County Clerks Association; Neal McBurnett; Dwight Shellman, CO Dept. of State
Colorado was the first state to implement statewide risk–limiting election audits, starting in 2017, and is the only state to provide audit data, at the ballot level, on essentially all contests. They are perhaps the closest we have come to achieving the objectives laid out in the Principles and Best Practices for Post–Election Audits, but significant gaps remain. This panel will dive into how risk–limiting audits have been evolving in Colorado, and how they can be improved.
3:15pm Break – Atrium
3:30pm Black and White & Wrong All Over—A Technical Analysis of Ballot Printing Errors In The 2020 and 2022 Election Cycles
Genya Coulter, OSET Institute
If paper ballots are the gold standard for verifiable elections, then why are print errors on ballots rarely discussed by the election community at large? This conference session analyzes the primary risk factors contributing to ballot printing errors during 2020 and 2022, their impact on public trust, and prevention strategies to reduce printing errors in future elections. Attendees will leave the EVN conference with a new toolkit in which to evaluate the verifiability, accuracy, security, and transparency of the ballot printing component of American elections.
4:15pm Transparency and Observations for Trustworthy Elections
Moderator: John McCarthy, Verified Voting
Panelists: Emily Brake, Colorado Republican Election Protection and Observation; Veronica Degraffenreid, Brennan Center for Justice; Neal Kelley, Committee for Safe and Secure Elections; David Levine, The Alliance for Securing Democracy at the George Marshall Fund
Panelists include election officials who have made election processes and data more transparent as well as experienced, respected, and keen observers of elections in the U.S. and around the world. We’ll discuss best practices as well as recent progress and challenges for increasing public trust in elections and election officials by providing transparent information about election procedures and data plus opportunities for in–person, remote, and recorded public observation of critical election processes in each and every jurisdiction and election.
8:15am Breakfast/check-in – Ballroom
9:15am Announcements – Auditorium
Josh Benaloh– Microsoft Research; Chair, EVN CoCo
9:30am Ballot Images and Cast Vote Records: Should They Be Public?
Moderator: Douglas Kellner, NY State Board of Elections
Panelists: Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research; Neal McBurnett
Ballot scanning machines record images of the ballots counted and a record of how each ballot is interpreted. This panel will explain the process and discuss the pros and cons of making ballot images and cast vote records public, along with a technological alternative that may achieve similar transparency without the drawbacks of publishing ballot images and cast vote records.
10:30am Break – Atrium
10:45am DVS Order Vulnerability
Moderator: J. Alex Halderman, University of Michigan
Panelists: Braden Crimmins, University of Michigan, Dhanya Yegna Narayanan, University of Michigan; Drew Springall, Auburn University
Due to a serious privacy flaw in Dominion’s ICP and ICE ballot scanners, public–facing election records like CVRs and ballot images reveal the order in which the ballots were cast. This can be exploited by insiders or even by members of the public to identify how people voted.
We discovered and publicly disclosed this flaw last year under the name DVSorder. In this panel, we will discuss implications of the problem for voter privacy, election equipment testing and certification, and election data transparency efforts. We’ll also discuss challenges we faced when trying to get actionable mitigation information into the hands of election officials. Our experience highlights the need for increased attention to privacy issues and for better coordinated vulnerability disclosure mechanisms within the election sector.
12:00pm Lunch – Ballroom
1:15pm Standardizing or Professionalizing the Post–Election Audit: A Discussion
Will Adler, Center For Democracy and Technology
Especially in the wake of 2021’s sham post–election reviews, there have been various calls to standardize the practice of post–election auditing. Last month, a group of audit experts met for a half–day convening at the Center for Democracy & Technology in DC to discuss what such standardization might look like. Will will provide a readout of the discussion, including which options participants found most promising for improving the practice of post–election auditing.
2:00pm Break
2:15pm Securing Voter Registration Systems
Panelists: Jack Cable, Independent Security Researcher; Mike Specter, Google
Voter registration is an essential part of almost any election process. Yet, despite notable compromises of voter registration systems, relatively little work has been devoted to securing voter registration, compared to other aspects of election security. In this talk, we will present our research developing the first rigorous framework for voter registration security, and creating novel technology to improve transparency of voter registration. Our framework describes the entities and core functionalities inherent in most voter registration systems, the jurisdictional policies that constrain specific implementations, and key security properties. Additionally, we are working on applying cryptographic techniques to develop a transparency log for voter registration systems to provide voters assurance that they are registered. In our work, we consulted with current and former U.S. election officials, and we plan to conduct pilots to field our research. Through this session, we hope to spark discussion around the security of voter registration systems and explore practical ways computer scientists, election experts, and election officials can collaborate to help secure voter registration and other non–voting technologies.
3:15pm Break
3:30pm Audits: Legislative Updates, Process Improvements
Moderator: Ginny Vander Roest, Voting Works
Panelists: Joseph Kirk, Bartow County, GA; Chris Wlaschin, Election Systems & Software
This panel will focus on risk limiting audits – lessons learned from 2022 and where we go from here. Panelists will discuss legislative and regulatory updates, their experiences implementing risk–limiting audits at the local and state level, and some of the logistical challenges of implementing RLAs and other tabulation audits, as well as what barriers are faced by those who might seek to ameliorate those barriers through technology changes and improvements, such as ballot sorting functions.
4:30pm Close and Toast – Atrium
Eddie Hailes, Advancement Project
