ACCURATE

ACCURATE PIs have built voting into their undergraduate and graduate courses. We have found that these efforts successfully engage students in the democratic process; in addition, the importance of election integrity makes voting an excellent tool to create excitement and engagement among students for learning difficult topics.

Below we have packaged a number of course modules, syllabi and other educational materials that you can use in your courses to engage your students in tinkering with the machinery of democracy.

Hack-a-Vote

We initially developed Hack-a-Vote, a simplified direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting system, to demonstrate how easy it might be to insert a Trojan horse into a voting system. This provides a superb platform as a course project to demonstrate that electronic voting software is not immune from security concerns. In this excercise, we use Hack-a-Vote in an associated course project, in which student teams implemented their own Trojan horses, then search the source code for their classmates’ malicious code. The Hack-a-Vote project reveals the potential damage individuals can cause with electronic voting systems, the feasibility of finding system weaknesses (deliberate or otherwise), and some solutions to mitigate the damage.