Poorvi Vora

Vora is a professor at George Washington University and one of the designers of Scantegrity, alongside David Chaum, Ron Rivest and others. It keeps ordinary optical-scan paper ballots but adds codes printed in invisible ink, so voters can later check online that their vote was counted — without being able to prove to anyone else how they voted.

In 2009 Takoma Park, Maryland, used Scantegrity II in a binding municipal election, the first of its kind with end-to-end verification. Vora has since worked on statistical audits of election results. The underlying idea is one she shares with Josh Benaloh: trust in an election should come from evidence anyone can check, not from assurances that the machines are fine.