Lawrence Norden, then deputy director of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, testified before the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform, Subcommittee on Information Technology with recommendations for securing our elections:
Introduction
On behalf of the Brennan Center for Justice, I thank the Subcommittee on Information and Technology for holding this hearing. We appreciate the opportunity to share with you the results of our extensive studies to ensure our nation’s voting systems are more secure and reliable. The Brennan Center for Justice is a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy organization that focuses on democracy and justice. We are deeply involved in the effort to ensure accurate and fair voting, improve voter registration, and to promote policies that maximize participation of eligible citizens in elections. For the last decade, I have led the Brennan Center’s extensive work on voting technology and security. In 2005, in response to growing public concern over the security of new electronic voting systems, I chaired a task force (the “Security Task Force”) of the nation’s leading technologists, election experts, and security professionals assembled by the Brennan Center to analyze the security and reliability of the nation’s electronic voting machines. In the decade since, I have authored or co-authored numerous studies on election system security, usability, cost and design.
Most recently, with my colleague Chris Famighetti, I co-authored America’s Voting Machines at Risk, a nearly year-long study that combined data from various public documents with surveys of more than 100 specialists familiar with voting technology, including voting machine vendors, independent technology experts and election officials in all 50 states.3 The report details the security and reliability risks associated with continuing to use equipment around the country that is rapidly approaching the end of its projected lifespan.