Did I actually vote for my candidate?
Channel: EFF-Austin
Date: 2020-05-16

Our speaker this month is Daniel Roesler. Daniel is a volunteer for the League of Women Voters, helping maintain Vote411.org, which publishes the largest collection of candidate information for every election in the country. Additionally, Daniel is a project lead at OpenAustin, a brigade of Code for America, where he is developing a public-domain database of every ballot in the country at BallotAPI.org.

Many places in Texas (including Austin's Travis county) are switching to paper-based ballots for elections. Hooray paper trail! However, when Daniel first tested out the new voting machines, he noticed there were some strange barcodes at the top of the ballots. What were these? Were they my actual votes? How do these new voting machines work? These questions took Daniel on a months-long journey deep into the way voting machines work and the complexities of barcodes, all to try to answer the question: "Did I actually vote for my candidate?"

In this talk, Daniel will present his findings on how the new voting systems work and what you can do to verify your printed ballot shows you actually voted for the correct candidate. As our voting infrastructure comes under attack more and more, it's our duty as voters to double-check the our own votes to ensure a functioning democracy.

EFF-Austin is sustained via the contributions of supporters like you. Donate via the Paypal link on our website at the top of the main page: https://effaustin.org