E. John Sebes

John is one of two co-founders and Chief Technology Officer ("CTO") for the U.S. based OSET Institute (“OSET”), a non-partisan non-profit 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation headquartered in the Silicon Valley.  He leads all aspects of technology strategy, vision, architecture, engineering and development for the TrustTheVote Project – the flagship effort of the Institute.  

OSET is an election technology research and development institute working with elections officials across the country to create publicly available election technology to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes and because we all deserve a better voting experience.  The mission is simple: increase integrity; improve turnout; and lower taxpayer cost.  The strategy is delivery.  To do this, the Institute is tackling the lack of verifiable, accurate, secure and transparent publicly available election technology primarily in the U.S., but with intentions of global availability.  The Institute’s flagship effort – known as the TrustTheVote Project – is designing and building a next-generation technology framework called “ElectOS” to serve as a draft standard for critical democracy infrastructure. All software is publicly available to any jurisdiction to adopt, adapt, and deploy—most likely through a commercial systems integrator.

Prior to the TrustTheVote Project, John has been a software developer, technical consultant, and CTO, working in several areas, including network infrastructure, application frameworks, embedded systems, critical infrastructure, data center operations, with strong common themes of risk management, security, privacy, and reliability. Innovation and technology transfer have been another consistent theme, in settings as varied as government-funded R&D, venture-backed start-ups, professional services, academia, and non-profits.

For parts of his career, John provided independent consulting services related to information security and IT operations assurance, for a variety of organizations ranging from technology start-ups and venture capital firms to major government agencies and established financial services firms.

At other times, John has been a Principal Investigator in R&D projects, ranging from DARPA projects performed in the pre-Web era, to recent work with DHS on public (open source) security technology.

He has been working in the non-profit world with a focus on election technology for over a decade, partly from a desire to do public service with his professional skills, and partly because it is a surprisingly good fit for several seemingly disparate parts of John’s work history and interests. John’s passion for defending democracy is based on a rich history as a 1st generation American, with a Hungarian family history rooted in escaping Nazi-occupied Europe.

Previously Chief Technology Officer at Solidcore Systems, Inc.; Vice President of Strategy at Securify; Chief Technology Officer of Network Associates Labs; and variety of consulting, development, and R&D management roles at commercial InfoSec pioneer Trusted Information Systems.

John is a co-author of 12 patents and 20+ publications