Dr. Matt Bernhard joins the team to work on RLAs & platform security

We’re pleased to announce that Dr. Matt Bernhard is joining our team as our first Research Engineer, bridging the engineering work we do with advanced research in election security. Bernhard recently defended his PhD in computer science at the University of Michigan, where his research covered the security of voting systems, both paper-ballot systems and post-election audits. Bernhard will contribute toArlo, VotingWorks’s open-source RLA tool, and to securing the software platform for all of our voting equipment in the field.

“I’m super excited to join the VotingWorks team,” said Matt Bernhard. “The core mission of transparent, affordable, secure elections is one that is long overdue, and VotingWorks is developing science-based solutions to deliver on that mission. I’m really looking forward to fostering working relationships between researchers and VotingWorks, and to set an example for the industry for how election technology companies should operate. I am also looking forward to facilitating the roll-out of secure technologies like risk-limiting audits to help protect elections, 2020 and beyond.”

“Dr. Bernhard is a unique expert working on pragmatic election security,” said Ben Adida, executive director and co-founder ofVotingWorks. “Securing elections requires both extensive technical understanding of the subject and deep empathy for and understanding of how elections are actually run. Dr. Bernhard brings both qualities to the team, through his ground-breaking research and his extensive work with election officials around the country.”

VotingWorks is a non-partisan non-profit building a secure, affordable, and simple voting system. VotingWorks voting machines create paper ballots that voters can directly verify. Arlo, VotingWorks’s risk-limiting audit software, ensures votes cast on any paper-based system are correctly tabulated. All VotingWorks software is open-source and available on GitHub.