Amid heightened concerns about the integrity of the voting process in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, two election security experts recently quit Verified Voting, a respected election accountability group, in protest. They claim that it has been downplaying security risks in popular voting machines.
Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech professor who sat on Verified Voter’s advisory board, just left the group, soon after the departure of UC Berkeley mathematics professor Philip Stark, a board member who sent a fiery letter of resignation on November 21st. Stark and DeMillo believe that Verified Voting has been giving election officials false confidence in their voting machines and providing cover for the companies that make and sell the machines.
The accountability group wields a lot of clout, since public officials rely on its recommendations when purchasing expensive voting systems. DeMillo, a professor at Georgia Tech University, has been deeply involved in trying to fix the voting systems in Georgia that saw widespread problems during the razor-thin gubernatorial election of 2018. And Stark designed a vote-verification tool that has been adopted by many states and endorsed by Verified Voting.
Part of the reason Verified Voting is such a trusted organization is that its members are respected scientists and researchers from academia. But both Stark and DeMillo believe that the leadership of the organization, including its president Marian Schneider, has its own agenda and has begun making public statements about elections and voting machines that aren’t backed up by science.
In his resignation letter, Stark accused the group of being on the “wrong side” by approving pricey new voting systems that replace hand-marked ballots with computer-printed ballot summary cards [BMD], the accuracy of which he questions since they depend on potentially insecure software.