Six years ago, a faculty adviser at the University of Michigan told Matthew Bernhard, a first-year Ph.D. student studying voting and elections, to specify his research. One year later, during the presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, heightened threats to election security via Russian interference and other concerns provided Bernhard with the confidence to pursue research in voting technology for the rest of his career.

“I got extraordinarily lucky to be someone who had already spent some time thinking about election security when it suddenly became the new popular thing,” Bernhard said.

Now a research engineer at the nonprofit, nonpartisan voting technology company VotingWorks, Bernhard is set to speak regarding methods for securing elections at a March 10 event hosted by Chapman University’s Grand Challenges Initiative (GCI), a course series for first-year and second-year students in the Schmid College of Science and Technology and the Fowler School of Engineering. 

“That set of courses is really about empowering students to contribute to solving really hard problems using science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” said Gregory Goldsmith, the director of GCI. “We feel it’s important to expose students to folks that are out in the world working on the types of hard problems that we would like students to be thinking about.”

Voting machines were a source of concern for 2020 election security, and private companies with little oversight played a factor in fears of election hacking or errors. Many believed there was machine vulnerability to hacking and errors and doubted the transparency and accountability of  companies — like Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic — that distribute the election technology.

Voting technology provided by VotingWorks is open-source, meaning the machines’ source-code is available to the public. While other private companies keep their software and hardware secret and difficult to investigate, VotingWorks’ software is publicly available to review or even use without purchase.

Bernhard told The Panther he feels the company is taking the right steps to approaching election security concerns. 

“(VotingWorks) wasn’t looking for a profit motive to make voting machines and that alone is worth its weight in gold,” Bernhard said. “If someone wanted to, they could run our entire voting system on their own; that’s fine by us.”

An NPR poll found that while 61% of Americans trust the results of the 2020 presidential election, 72% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats do not. Chapman University’s 2021 Orange County Annual Survey results support this general trend, with 69% of respondents believing that the election was conducted fairly and, more specifically, 67% of Republicans and 3% of Democrats believing the opposite.

The results of the 2020 election were found to be valid regardless of any claims to the contrary. Bernhard and VotingWorks assisted risk-limiting audits that confirmed the election results in contested states like Georgia. 

Fred Smoller, a Chapman University campaigns and elections professor, believes that election security is not a current pressing matter. Rather, he believes the unwillingness of people to accept the election’s results is a matter of more concern.

“There are certain things that are simply fact,” Smoller said. “The Holocaust really happened, we really landed on the moon and Joe Biden won the election. There is no election fraud.”

Bernhard believes misinformation is both a powerful tool and a tremendous concern, as evidence is only useful when people are not already predisposed to disregard it, he said. Nevertheless, he feels that open-source technology provides one piece to the puzzle. 

“Elections are really complicated processes, and it’s really hard to convey to anybody the intricacies of a given, particular election,” Bernhard said. “One of the ways that can help people be confident — that can help contain this doubt about elections — is by being as aggressively transparent as possible.” 

Whitney Gassmann Mennes, a sophomore political science major at Chapman, believes the issue of election security has grown in importance on both sides of the aisle since the 2016 presidential election.

“Really examining election security and making sure that everyone is in agreement on how elections are conducted and the security of our elections is really important in maintaining faith in our democracy,” Mennes said.

Bernhard, who initially wanted to work in academia as a professor, is looking forward to speaking with Chapman students across different fields of study. As he first stumbled across what became his career as a sophomore computer science major in college, he said he hopes to similarly inspire Chapman’s undergraduates during his event.