Visionaries on the Front Lines of Electoral Reform & Democratic Process
The mission of the OSET Institute is providing research, development and education on election technology to serve as critical democracy infrastructure. We’re a nonprofit nonpartisan public benefit election technology research and development institute led by a group of social entrepreneurs. We're now 70+ people strong, dedicated to sustaining technology R&D efforts that create public election technology for any jurisdiction to adopt, adapt, and deploy.
The Institute's flagship initiative is the TrustTheVote® Project (www.trusthevote.org) which is the democracy software foundry working on technology such as ElectOS (electos.org) and other voter services technology. The objective is to produce a public election technology framework that is more verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent than anything before it. This framework, ElectOS, will be be freely available for vendors to integrate with off-the-shelf hardware and some new security technology (for root of trust, trusted-boot and hardware attestation), and then adapt to local jurisdictions' needs as finished voting systems.
It is anticipated this technology platform will dramatically cut costs, while innovating usability, vastly improving security, and rejuvenating the necessary commercial industry to deliver, service, and support the resulting critical election technology infrastructure. The potential of this work is a massively scalable transformation of democracy administration globally in order to increase trust and security, lower costs and improve usability. The work applies security-centric engineering practices and user-centered design principles.
The OSET Institute deeply appreciates its corporate sponsors who see the social impact importance of this work, and is very thankful to the public — individuals like you — who provide the financial support to make this work possible so that we may all trust the vote.