BallotIQ, LLC, Cybersecurity Startup with Focus on Election Security, Rings Innovation Partnerships’ Startup Bell
9/5/2024
BallotIQ, LLC, marked its official launch as a University of Michigan (U-M) startup by ringing the Innovation Partnerships’ startup bell on September 5th, 2024. Representing the company was co-founder J. Alex Halderman, the Bredt Family Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society and Michigan CSE Systems Lab. Co-founders Braden Crimmins, a U-M computer science and engineering PhD student, and Brad Sturt, an assistant professor of information and decision sciences at the University of Illinois-Chicago, joined the celebration via Zoom.
“We are enormously grateful for the support we have received from the team at Innovation Partnerships and they have been an invaluable resource in helping us bring BallotIQ to market,” said J. Alex Halderman at the bell ringing ceremony. “It is an incredibly valuable time to re-examine the processes and security systems surrounding elections. Our team is proud to be leading the charge to bring science and technology to bear to make elections operate better than ever.”
BallotIQ leverages tools from operations and cybersecurity research to enhance the security and administration of United States elections. Their patent-pending technology aids election officials in performing rigorous pre-election testing of voting machines and identifying potential misconfigurations that could swap votes between candidates. This technology has already been piloted in real-world elections in Michigan. Beyond improving election security, it also helps detect errors in the ballot design, which can be costly for election officials to correct. The result is improved efficiency for election administration and strengthened voter confidence.
“It has been such a pleasure working with the BallotIQ team,” said MJ Cartwright, mentor-in-residence with Innovation Partnerships. “Their work truly exemplifies the kinds of groundbreaking research coming out of the University of Michigan. Research commercialization is foundational to an innovative society, so supporting our university researchers on the path to commercialization is crucial. The BallotIQ team has risen to that challenge, and we are excited to see the impact their product will have on Michigan and beyond.”
The technology that led to the formation of BallotIQ stems from years of research by Halderman and his colleagues on computer security and privacy as they relate to political systems. Halderman’s research has frequently addressed vulnerabilities and other technical shortcomings in current voting equipment, many of which arise because the United States’ modern voting infrastructure lags roughly fifteen to twenty years behind comparable tech sectors. This lag is exacerbated by the small size of the market, which offers little incentive for innovation.
Concerns about best practices for detecting misconfigured election equipment prompted Halderman, Crimmins and Sturt to develop an updated design for Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). LAT involves submitting test ballots to voting machines to ensure vote counts are accurate. Halderman and his team advanced this process by creating specialized LAT ballots that allow the tests to detect a much wider range of potential problems. Called Robust Logic and Accuracy Testing (RLAT), their novel approach uses algorithmically-designed vote structures to detect machine incongruities efficiently, with reduced overhead costs and labor compared to traditional LAT.
BallotIQ is the commercialization of Halderman and his team’s RLAT technology. The licensing agreement was officially executed by the Innovation Partnerships team on June 27, 2024. Licensing support and patent protection for BallotIQ were provided by associate director of software, content licensing and research partnerships Ashwathi Iyer, with mentorship from mentor-in-residence MJ Cartwright.