# Verified Voting **Verified Voting** is a nonpartisan nonprofit that works on the role of technology in elections. Its best-known product is **The Verifier**, a public, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction database of the voting and tabulation equipment in use across the country, along with each state's audit and recount laws. It calls the Verifier "the most comprehensive publicly available data set on voting equipment going back to 2006" (Wikipedia gives 2004). Journalists, researchers, election officials and litigants all use it to answer the basic question of what machines are counting a given race. ## Origins and people Stanford computer scientist **David Dill** started it. He wrote a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" in January 2003, launched VerifiedVoting.org that July, and set up the Verified Voting Foundation in February 2004. | Period | Leader | |---|---| | 2007–2017 | Pamela Smith, president | | 2017–2020 | Marian K. Schneider, a former Pennsylvania election official | | 2020–2021 | Interim co-directors Mark Lindeman and Cris Landa | | 2021–2022 | Sangita Sigdyal, CEO | | March 2022 to now | Pamela Smith, president and CEO (in post as of 2026) | Computer scientist Barbara Simons chairs the board. The advisory board includes cryptographer Ron Rivest and Michigan's J. Alex Halderman. The MacArthur Foundation lists it as a grantee ([[MacArthur Foundation]]); grant amounts are not confirmed here. ## Positions - **For:** voter-verified paper ballots ([[Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail]]) and routine [[Risk-Limiting Audit]]s before certification. It has testified for state audit bills in Maryland and Connecticut. - **Against:** paperless electronic voting and internet or mobile voting. Its audit-law database came from Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota in 2017, and it added a recount-law database in October 2024 (see [[Recount]]). ## Criticism from its own side Its sharpest critics have been election-security researchers, not partisans. In November 2019 statistician Philip Stark, the inventor of the risk-limiting audit, resigned from Verified Voting, and Georgia Tech's Richard DeMillo also left. They said the group was giving cover to [[Ballot Marking Device]]s and that some of its statements were not "backed up by science." That dispute matters for the right-wing hand-count movement. Activists who want machines gone point to the same security researchers. But those researchers argue for hand-marked paper ballots and statistical audits, not for full hand counts. ## 2025–2026 The items below come from Verified Voting's own press releases: - **August 18, 2025.** After Trump promised to end mail ballots and voting machines, Smith said: "No President has the authority to run elections." - **April 1, 2026.** She called [[Executive Order 14399]] "unlawful and unworkable." - **Mid-2026.** It also issued statements on the July 2026 firing of the [[Election Assistance Commission]] commissioners and on the Tina Peters commutation. ## See Also - [[How a Ballot Is Counted]] · [[How Election Results Are Transmitted and Reported]] · [[Election Ballot Chain of Custody Flow]] - [[Risk-Limiting Audit]] · [[Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail]] · [[Ballot Marking Device]] · [[Recount]] - [[Richard Hasen]] · [[How a Voting System Is Certified and Decertified]]