National: CISA and VotingWorks release open source post-election auditing tool | Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and VotingWorks, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, have open-sourced today a tool for the post-election auditing process. Developed by VotingWorks and named Arlo, the tool is available on GitHub. It’s a web-based app designed specifically for the US election process where votes are tallied electronically using software or special machines. To safeguard the election process against hacked or faulty voting systems, the US government mandates that all counted votes go through a post-election audit to verify the results, in a process called a Risk-Limiting Audit (RLA). Arlo is designed to automate this auditing process by automatically selecting random voter ballots for the RLA process, providing auditors with the information they need to find those ballots in storage, helping officials compare audited votes to tabulated votes, and providing monitoring & reporting capabilities so that election officials and public observers can follow the audit’s progress and outcome. “The tool supports numerous types of post-election audits across various types of voting systems including all major vendors,” CISA said in a press release today. CISA did not develop Arlo — created by VotingWorks on its own — but the agency has adopted the tool and is currently working on convincing state election officials to deploy it before next year’s presidential election.

Mississippi: The Way America Votes Is Broken. In One Rural County, a Nonprofit Showed a Way Forward. | Jessica Huseman/ProPublica

Choctaw County’s election centers opened at 7 a.m. last Tuesday, and voters were greeted by poll workers who’d just set up brand-new voting machines. “If you need any help, just holler,” poll worker Albert Friddle told a voter as he walked her through the new system. She didn’t holler. Using a machine the size of a briefcase, she selected her choices, printed and double-checked her ballot, and dropped it into a secured blue box provided by the county. Indeed, the day went without anyone hollering. “Everything went just fine,” said Amy Burdine, Choctaw County circuit clerk. “Just as expected.” The scene in Mississippi, if modest in its particulars, was seen by some as a telling moment at a time of great anxiety about the accuracy and security of the nation’s voting systems. Mississippi is one of only a few states in the country to allow the use of voting machines that have not been certified by federal authorities, and the state has no certification process of its own. As a result, the machines at work for the first time in Choctaw County last week were built by VotingWorks — a small nonprofit organization founded by Ben Adida and Matt Pasternack. Adida and Pasternack selected the state both for its regulatory environment and because many counties in the state continue to use paperless voting systems, allowing the company, Adida said, to “very quickly improve the security of voting in Mississippi by reintroducing paper.”