Galois Launches Election Technology Spinoff: Free & Fair To Enable Verifiable, Transparent and Secure Elections

Portland, OR  – Galois today announced the launch of Free & Fair, a pioneering election technology company that offers high assurance, open source software and systems that enable truly verifiable, transparent and secure elections. Free & Fair intends to fundamentally change the way election technology is created and deployed, reducing costs for taxpayers while allowing election officials to take back control of their election systems.

Galois is an R&D organization that specializes in developing provably correct security technologies for systems critical to national security. Last year, Galois successfully demonstrated software for DARPA that prevents hacking of unmanned systems. It regularly releases multi-million dollar security projects as open source for public benefit.  Free & Fair seeks to apply these proven Galois techniques and approach to help election officials move from restrictive, proprietary vendor systems with expensive short-term licenses to high assurance, open source software that they own outright.

“Most U.S. jurisdictions today use election technology developed in the 1990s, and the typical voting system is running an operating system that is no longer vendor-supported, does not have security patches regularly applied, and relies on outdated technology,” said Free & Fair Founder and CEO Joseph Kiniry, who served as Research Lead, Verifiable Elections at Galois. “By developing high assurance, open source software and services whose security and architecture are reviewed by the world’s foremost experts in academia and industry, Free & Fair is ready to help election officials take back control of their election systems.”

Free & Fair will offer products and services for election jurisdictions seeking transparent, open source elections and voting technology that runs on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. Free & Fair products provide third-party verifiable evidence of their correctness. The new products include:

• Free & Fair Tabulator – a secure and verifiable ballot scanning and tabulation system.
• Free & Fair ePollbook – a scalable, secure and resilient electronic poll book solution for precinct polling places and county vote centers.
• Free & Fair Supervised Voting System – A complete polling place solution based on STAR-Vote: a secure, transparent, auditable, and reliable voting system designed jointly by computer software and security experts and election officials from across the country.

About the Founder

In addition to his previous position at Galois, Dr. Joe Kiniry has served as an adviser to multiple governments across the world in matters relating to elections technology, and has nearly twenty years experience in the design, development, support, and auditing of supervised and Internet/remote electronic voting systems while he was a professor at various universities in Europe. Prior to joining Galois in 2014, Dr. Kiniry was a Full Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), where he was the Head of DTU’s Software Engineering section. Over the past decade, he has held permanent positions at four universities in Denmark, Ireland, and The Netherlands.

Supporting Quotes

Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat – President and CEO U.S. Vote Foundation

“Joe Kiniry is uniquely qualified to achieve the Free & Fair vision to re-instill transparency and confidence in the U.S. elections. With his depth of experience and proven competence in design, development, support, and auditing of supervised and Internet electronic voting systems, Joe is certainly one of the top election technology experts in the world.”

Stephanie Singer – Former Philadelphia City Commissioner, 2012-2016

“It’s about time someone applied the same level of security to elections as are applied to America’s defense and intelligence services. And because the software is open source and appropriate for commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, election administrators can save millions, if not billions, of taxpayer dollars over the next decade in implementation, maintenance and upgrade costs.”

About Galois

Galois, founded in 1999, performs computer science research and development for commercial, defense, and intelligence industries. With many of the world’s foremost experts in computer science and mathematics, Galois has tackled the world’s most difficult challenges in computer science, proving the feasibility of cutting edge research as it applies to critical systems. Technology companies turn to Galois to build reliability, safety and security into their product development from day one. Other Galois spin-offs include Tozny (www.tozny.com), Sailfan Research (www.sailfan.io), and Formaltech (www.formal.tech). For additional information on Galois or Free & Fair, visit www.galois.com and freeandfair.us.