Presentations will focus on providing impartial facts and ground truth about election technology security strengths and weaknesses, uninfluenced by politics or posturing.

Following the 2020 election, unfounded claims of election rigging were frequently repeated, often improperly conflating actual (or sometimes fictitious) voting system vulnerabilities with evidence of actual fraud. Similar patterns have emerged since the 2024 election.  

In response officials, legislators, vendors, and leading advocacy groups – seeking to dispel baseless claims in order to bolster voter confidence – have frequently overstated election security measures, and minimized or dismissed real and serious voting system vulnerabilities. As a result, the real story has been muddied, confused, and often influenced by partisan considerations.

August 8 and 9, the Election Integrity Foundation (EIF) and Free Speech for People (FSFP) will jointly host a conference oriented to provide attendees, election officials,  and the media with a clear-eyed, accurate, and realistic understanding of the state of election technology security. The program, “Symposium on Election Security; Separating Fact from Fiction,” will be held in conjunction with the DEF CON Voting Village, at the Las Vegas Convention Center. 

“Our democracy is in peril,” said Susan Greenhalgh, Senior Advisor on Election Security at Free Speech For People. “We can’t afford to deceive ourselves about the strengths and weaknesses of our election infrastructure, the central mechanisms by which we determine our government by the people,. We cannot afford to ignore well-documented security breaches and known system vulnerabilities because of well-meaning campaigns to build voter confidence. ” 

“Modern elections increasingly depend on complex technology at almost every stage, from managing voter registrations, to collecting and tallying ballots, to reporting results,” said Matt Blaze, McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown, and chair of EIF’s board. “Much of this technology is opaque and poorly understood by the public, which can create a ripe environment not only for potential fraud, but for the spread of misinformation about the integrity of hotly-contested elections”.

The symposium will feature a key-note speech by Debra Bowen, former California Secretary of State and 2008 recipient of the “John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage,” award, presented to her for her ground-breaking Top-to-Bottom review of California’s voting equipment.