On Thursday, October 10, Georgetown University’s Matt Blaze, PhD, comes to Kansas City’s Linda Hall Library to examine the technologies used in elections, the way they can fail, and practical safeguards that mitigate risks they introduce.
From voter registration to tallying ballots to reporting results, technology – computers and software – plays a central role in almost every aspect of U.S. elections. Information technology has become essential for managing the U.S.’s complex elections, and when all goes well, provides great benefits in efficiency, accuracy, and usability. But computers and software are also notoriously (and fundamentally) unreliable and vulnerable to tampering, and the systems we use for voting and election management are no exception. In some ways, the integrity of election outcomes has become dependent on the integrity of technology that may not always work as intended. Can we trust our elections? Should we?
Fortunately, while the unreliability and vulnerability of election technology is a real problem, recent advances have found reliable methods for conducting high-integrity elections even with flawed (or malicious) technology.
The Speaker
Matt Blaze is the McDevitt Professor of Law and Computer Science at Georgetown University, where his research focuses on large-scale secure systems, surveillance, voting, and similar problems that lie at the intersection of technology and public policy. He has led voting systems security studies on behalf of two states, is a founder of the DEFCON Voting Village, and has been called upon numerous times by various government entities to offer analysis and advice on securing election systems.
The Program
This program, Elections, Technology, and Trust in 2024 and Beyond, will be held at the Linda Hall Library on Thursday, October 10, at 7:00 PM. The event is free to attend with advanced registration. Click here to visit the event page and register: https://bit.ly/4gvsT2H
Virtual Attendance Option
This program will be presented in-person at the Linda Hall Library. If you would prefer to watch this program virtually, please follow this link to register: VIRTUAL REGISTRATION
