Dr Philip Stark - Trustworthy Elections Evidence and Dispute Resolution

In this keynote address at the DEF CON 27 Voting Village, Dr. Philip Stark, Professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, outlines rigorous mathematical frameworks for verifiable democratic elections and evidence-based dispute resolution. He begins at 04:00 by challenging the premise of software trust in democratic elections, arguing that elections should never rely on blind faith in complex computer code, firmware, or vendor secrecy.

Dr. Stark presents the statistical mechanics of Risk-Limiting Audits (RLAs) at 08:00, explaining how this audit methodology provides strong mathematical guarantees of detecting and correcting incorrect contest outcomes by conducting systematic manual audits of paper ballots. At 12:00, he underscores the indispensable prerequisite for RLAs: an immutable, voter-verified physical paper trail, noting that any jurisdiction utilizing paper ballots can conduct rigorous risk-limiting audits.

Examining ongoing disputes within the election security community at 16:00, Dr. Stark analyzes the technical risks of universal Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) versus hand-marked paper ballots, arguing that BMDs introduce software dependencies between voter intent and the physical record. He concludes at 24:00 by detailing how combining strongly software-independent voting systems, optical scanners, and robust hand-count audits establishes verifiable evidence necessary to resolve electoral challenges transparently. (AI summary — Gemini Flash)