Virginia Vander Roest Joins VotingWorks to Scale Risk-Limiting Audits

We’re pleased to announce that Virginia (Ginny) Vander Roest is joining our team after 20 years serving as an election administrator at the local and state levels in Michigan. As Sr. Election Implementation Manager, Vander Roest will rapidly scale VotingWorks’ ability to support states running risk-limiting audits using VotingWorks’s Risk-Limiting Audit tool to meet unprecedented demand from states to audit the 2020 Presidential Election.

“I’m pleased to join the VotingWorks team,” said Vander Roest. “As an election administrator, I’m most concerned about ensuring the integrity and security of our systems. VotingWorks provides two key elements to do just that by assisting states and counties with the implementation of Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs) and developing secure and affordable voting machines. I’m excited to bring my expertise to an organization focused on these important components of the election process.”

“Ginny’s life work is elections - making them secure and both simple for voters and practical for election administrators,” said Matt Pasternack, co-founder of VotingWorks. “With empathy born from the experience of running elections and building state-wide capacity, Ginny is uniquely positioned to help VotingWorks support risk limiting audits across the country during this critical 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.

Virginia (Ginny) Vander Roest has been an election administrator since 1999, working at the local level (City of Kalamazoo) for 12 years, and most recently as the Training and Communications Manager for the Michigan Bureau of Elections. Vander Roest has been responsible for the implementation of Michigan’s RLA project for the last year and a half and is one of the Circle of Advisors for the Election Validation Project. A Certified Elections/Registration Administrator (CERA) through Auburn University and the Election Center, Vander Roest currently serves as a steering committee member for the Investing in Elections research project and as an advisor on the Auburn University Graduate Certificate in Election Administration Board.