At Free Speech For People, we work daily to fight back to protect democracy and the right to vote. That means protecting everyone’s right to cast a ballot, and ensuring that every ballot is counted as cast. 

That’s why we co-hosted a vital symposium on election security on August 8-9, 2025, with the Election Integrity Foundation (EIF) at the DEF CON Voting Village in Las Vegas to confront the facts about election security.  

At FSFP, we’ve long fought for more secure, transparent, and auditable voting equipment. We know that our voting system vendors are poorly regulated, that our voting systems have significant security weaknesses, and that corrupt election officials can and have enabled insider attacks. 

But since Donald Trump claimed falsely and without evidence that the 2020 election was rigged, there’s been a communications backlash to try to counter these false claims by overstating the security of our election systems, and the strength and effectiveness of our post-election audits. 

As our democracy is on the brink, we cannot afford to deceive ourselves about the true state of our election infrastructure that counts our votes. We cannot afford to ignore well-documented security breaches and known system vulnerabilities because of political posturing or well-meaning campaigns to build voter confidence. We need to confront the facts.

This symposium separates fact from fiction and provides a clear-eyed understanding of our election systems’ strengths and weaknesses for the press, public, and other organizations protecting democracy. Voters have the right to understand when there are legitimate concerns about our voting systems.

That’s why this symposium is so important – we need to understand and confront the problems so we can effectively address them for 2026 and beyond.

You can watch the full symposium via the video links below:

FRIDAY

1. Welcome to the Symposium – EIF/FSFP
2. Fundamentals of Election Technology Security – Matt Blaze
3. The Importance of State Certification Programs for Election Technology
4. When Insiders Become The Threat
5. History and Significance of the Top to Bottom Review (TTBR) and the Post Elections Audit Standards Working Group.  Hon. Debra Bowen former CA SOS
6. Digging Deeper – Reflections on TTBR and EVEREST
7. Evidence Based Elections and Software Independence
8. Risk Limiting Audits: What They Are and What They Aren’t
9. CARVER Vulnerability Analysis and the US Voting System

SATURDAY

1. A Recipe for Distrust: Regulatory Failure with Ballot Marking Devices
2. Common Cause NY and The Black Institute’s Legal Challenge to the ExpressVote XL’s Use of Barcodes to Record Votes
3. When the Paper Trail Leads Nowhere, by Design
4. Review of Post-Election Audits in Swing States – Don’t Just Trust; Always Verify
5. Dominion Touchscreen: Simple Hacks and Daunting Recoveries
6. How the DMCA Security Research Exemption Affects Election Security Research
7. Protecting Election Researchers Globally: Legal Gaps and Lessons From the Global South
8. Is It Safe Yet? Online Voting, in Theory
9. It’s Not Safe Yet
10. Is End-to-End-Verifiability an Internet Voting Magic Bullet
11. The ‘Fortress Island’ of Voting System Physical Security