Welcome to Voting Village 2026

This opening session kicks off the 2026 Voting Village at DEF CON 34, the tenth year the Election Integrity Foundation has run it. Founders and board members introduce themselves and explain why they care about election security. The origin story is recounted: after a 2016 Library of Congress exemption to the DMCA covered good-faith research on voting equipment, a group bought voting machines on eBay. That protected them from manufacturer threats, and the open community began examining the hardware.

The speakers describe how the village grew from a room of machines into a venue for technical election security research. The first year surfaced vulnerabilities that earlier academic studies had missed. Preview highlights for the weekend include a first public account of an analysis of Puerto Rico voting equipment that the federal government seized and never published, and a talk on ballot deanonymization in Georgia. A hacking lab with equipment and background write-ups sits next door, and election officials attend to learn and share problems.

The speakers note that vendors remain wary of the village, and that the adversarial relationship from earlier years has not fully gone away. Their takeaway is that open examination and disclosure are how weaknesses get fixed, and that informed debate depends on tested facts rather than denial. Recordings are promised on YouTube after some post-processing.