Professor Dan Wallach Joins VotingWorks for 2020

VotingWorks is pleased to announce that Rice University’sProf. Dan Wallach will be joining the VotingWorks team while he is on sabbatical for the 2020 calendar year. Wallach’s responsibilities at VotingWorks will include conducting security audits as well as assisting in the design and engineering of VotingWorks’s Risk-Limiting Audit tool and Voting Machines.

“I’m really excited by the opportunity to work with VotingWorks”, said Prof. Wallach. “It’s important for any researcher’s work to have impact beyond just publishing papers; this is a great chance to ensure that our best research ideas on building secure voting systems can be broadly disseminated as part of VotingWorks’s open-source platforms.”

“We believe in making voting secure, affordable, and delightful for every American citizen,” said Ben Adida, Executive Director of VotingWorks. “The only way to achieve this goal is by working with the very best people in the election space. Prof. Wallach has been at the forefront of election security research for more than 15 years, and we’re particularly proud and excited to have him on the VotingWorks team for this very important election year.”

VotingWorks is a non-partisan non-profit building a secure, affordable, and delightful 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.

Dan Wallach has been a professor at Rice since 1998, previously earning his PhD at Princeton University, working with Ed Felten and Andrew Appel. Wallach’s lab has worked on a variety of topics, ranging from web browser and server security issues, through peer-to-peer systems, smartphones, and electronic voting systems, publishing over 100 papers with over 10,000 citations. Wallach currently serves as the IEEE representative to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). Wallach has also served on the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association and on the U.S. Air Force’s Science Advisory Board. Wallach has a courtesy joint appointment with Rice’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and is a Rice Scholar with Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.