How We Protect Election Systems
Cybersecurity is our first and most important design consideration and its principles are based on 5 main pillars:
- Defense-in-depth
We use a defense-in-depth concept that employs multiple layers of protection combined with a variety of auditability safeguards for holistic security. Doing so makes our voting systems secure without sacrificing usability and accessibility. This means that the user is only given access or permissions needed to perform their specific tasks.
- Least privilege
This means that the user is only given access or permissions needed to perform their specific tasks. - Segregation of duties
Assigns various steps in a process to different people reducing their opportunities to control or alter a process. - Zero trust
Zero trust is an approach to designing security architectures based on the premise that every interaction begins in an untrusted state. This approach requires all users (internal or external) to be authenticated, authorized, and continuously validated. - Transparency
Although not traditionally identified as a security principle, we believe transparency to be a crucial pillar of a secure design for elections. A system that generates evidence, a transparency trace, that is both easy to understand and validate, makes a system more reliable and secure.
Providing a verifiable trail in which each step is open to scrutiny by stakeholders helps establish trust and public confidence in the process. Voters need a free and fair system that allows them to confirm their vote was cast as intended, stored as cast, and counted as cast.
Protecting Election Integrity
To protect and evaluate the integrity of our systems, Smartmatic leverages an election cybersecurity framework developed by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).
Ongoing public conversations about an ideal approach to protecting the integrity of elections have tended to lack a general reference model or even a commonly agreed upon set of security objectives. The GTRI model is a comprehensive reference to protect and evaluate election integrity.
When most people think of election cybersecurity, they tend to focus only on voting machines. But that’s just one aspect of the election security ecosystem.
Technology is only as secure as the people, procedures and context in which it is used. That’s why we look beyond product design and encryption to processes, policies and your existing infrastructure. This ensures faultless security, compatibility and optimal operation.
If you have a question about our company or our technologies, please email us at asksmartmatic@smartmatic.com.
Can electronic voting systems protect your vote? Yes! Robust election technology from Smartmatic can help secure votes against hacking and accidental faults with multi-layered safety systems, redundant backups and distributed data storage for rich audit trails.
Voter verified paper ballots further the system’s security by providing additional validation of voter intent. Curious to learn more? Watch the video.