News & Insights
We’re Making History in Real Time.
Our timely insights share informed perspectives on the rapidly evolving story of Election Technology, as it unfolds.
Who Should Make an Elections AI Service Agent? (Part 6)
In this final installment of how to build an NLA (a domain-specific or DS-NLA) — the how informing the who question (that we started with back in mid-Dec ‘23) — I focus on what may be the most overlooked set of questions about how a system should be built — not just for serving users, but supporting it’s operators…
Who Should Make an Elections AI Service Agent? (Part 5)
In the previous (4th) installment in this series, we pivoted from the question of who can or should build Chatbots, to the challenge of How to build a safe, low-tolerance, domain-specific natural language agent (NLA or “DS-NLA”). This time, we assume for the moment that challenge is tractable and explore the question, “What else is required, in addition to a safe base model?”…
Who Should Make a Voter AI Chatbot? (Part 4)
After an extended holiday break from my last installment on the question: “Who should make a Chatbot for voters?” — I’m back for the 4th installment in this series. This time, I’m pivoting from the Who question to the How question; and I have definitely pivoted from “Chatbot” to “domain-specific natural language agent” (NLA)…
Who Should Make a Voter AI Chatbot? (Part 3)
After two installments on the question: “Who should make a Chatbot for voters?” — we’ve come down to 3 observations:
Elections is an area of very low tolerance for inaccuracies, hallucinations, and repeating falsehoods.
It’s a terrible idea to build a so-called “lightweight Chatbot” app on top of the existing services powered by current LLMs from the AI tech-titans.
It’s not a good idea for any of those tech-titans to use their expertise and resources to tinker with their own LLM to be a specialized info service.
So then, given what needs to be built, we can finally consider who in the hec can (or should)…
Who Should Make a Voter AI Chatbot? (Part 2)
In the previous installment of this series, I gave a simple answer of “Nobody!” to the question of who should build a voter Chatbot. The reason was simple: the typical Chatbot is equally simple — and fatally flawed: a thin veneer of web (or App) user interface on top of an application programming interface (API) that connects over the Internet to a massive computing complex run by tech titans. and that’s only the beginning of the challenges…
Who Should Make a Voter AI Chatbot?
One of the side effects of the AI frenzy this past year is that lots of people are talking about the idea of having an AI-powered ChatBot for their favorite thing. Election-land is not immune to this desire. Like everywhere else, the idea is more-or-less similar: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could wave a magic wand and have an Oracle appear that is safe and reliable to answer any question about my favorite topic?” Well as the old saying goes, “Not so fast there, my friend”…
Straight Talk About Election Security Plain Talk
On June 21st the House Administration Committee held a Markup Session for HR 2722 the SAFE Act. We monitor as much of these proceedings as we can. And this one in particular compelled our CTO John Sebes to not only produce a Paper clarifying or correcting several assertions made by a House Member during that proceeding, but also led to a 7-part “plain talk” series on election security posted on our TrustTheVote Project blog. In this post here, John explains why…
A Major Breakthrough Development in the Innovation of Election Technology
On Thursday March 14th it was announced that the Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) Program has selected Galois, a premier computer science company and a security engineering partner of the OSET Institute, to develop a public prototype voting system in order to demonstrate the Program’s advancements in hardware and system security. This is an enormously pivotal piece of news in the mission to innovate election technology infrastructure to be Verifiable, Accurate, Secure, and Transparent (the “VAST mandate'“)…
Thinking and Acting Locally for the Nation’s Sake— A Strategy for Improving Election Security
This is the first of a two-part article by our Associate General Counsel and Director for International Development, Joy London, that considers a local, state-based strategy for improving the nation’s election security rather than purely a top-down federal approach.
A 116th Opportunity: New Congress to Offer Ambitious Election Reform Bill to Defend Democracy
We’ve said it many times and it bears worth repeating: foreign interference in U.S. elections is a threat to our democracy. The security of critical election infrastructure is the focal point of the OSET Institute’s mission. So, OSET leadership was pleased to learn that on January 3, 2019, the opening day of the 116th session of Congress, the newly elected House Democratic majority, led by Speaker-designate Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-12), will have its first order of legislative business—House Resolution #1 (“H.R.1”), a comprehensive election reform bill. The question is will H.R.1 become law, and be the change-agent needed to better defend democracy?
Senate Intelligence Committee Announces Election Security Recommendations
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) offered up its first set of draft recommendations today (Tuesday) from its on-going investigation of foreign intervention in American sovereignty—specifically our election processes including both campaigns and electioneering, and the actual process of election administration. They were announced earlier today with a press conference held by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Those draft SSCI recommendations are as follows in this article with some commentary of our own...
Another Proposed Solution Set to Protect U.S. Elections
Danielle Root and Liz Kennedy at the Center for American Progress (“CAP”) published an important Briefing today highlighting nine solutions to secure America’s elections. The Briefing is well researched and offers a keen assessment of our current public elections’ average level of integrity. I want to say right up front, this is good and important work. What we offer as a review and comment here is intended to catalyze an intellectually honest conversation, and not to serve as some critique of their good work.