OUR MISSION

DEFENDING DEMOCRACY WORLDWIDE.

Mail-in ballot on table with pen

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

  • Democracy worldwide must be defended through trustworthy public election technology.

  • To be trustworthy, public election technology must be verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent.

  • Trustworthiness of election technology compels a shift away from black-box proprietary toward glass-box public technology.

  • Everyone deserves a better, safer, more trustworthy voting experience– for voters and election administrators alike.  

    These principles guide our work.

Established in 2007, our nonpartisan, nonprofit mission is to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes in order to preserve the operational continuity of democracy — ultimately worldwide.

The Four Corners of Our Agenda:

  1. Public Technology: We're pursuing and achieving our mission through the research, development and eventual certification of publicly-owned election technology software.  That work is embodied in what we call ElectOS™ — a software framework that will be freely available for any jurisdiction to adopt, adapt, and deploy for elections .  That adaptation can be performed in-house or by an outside commercial systems integrator. 

  2. Open Source:  To achieve this, we employ the principles and practices of open source development, user-centered design, and security-centric systems engineering in a meritocratic environment at the TrustTheVote® Project. Open source to us means more than source code — it covers all aspects of our work and systems design. Open source is neither necessary nor sufficient, but it offers an essential path to complete technology transparency. And it’s one of the fastest growing aspects of government technology.

  3. Defense of Democracy:  This is an imperative effort to ensure integrity and increase confidence in our public elections. We want to reduce, if not eliminate common troubles with voting machinery through lower cost, higher quality, public software that minimizes attack surfaces. And verifiable technology can reduce disinformation and misinformation; ideally, it can end the use of terms like “rigged,” “tampered,” “hacked,” or “illegitimate.”

  4. Restoring Trust: The means by which we cast and count our ballots is tantamount to “critical democracy infrastructure” and as such, cannot be a black box, but rather a glass box. Success of the Institute's work and the TrustTheVote Project can increase confidence in elections and their outcomes, for America and every democracy, worldwide over time.