For more information on the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project see their website.
The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project came into being even as the ballots from the 2000 presidential election were being counted and the Florida recount was being contested in court. The presidents of Caltech and MIT, David Baltimore and Charles Vest, convened a team of mechanical engineers, computer scientists, human factor designers, and social scientists from their respective campuses to respond to the national need for strong academic guidance at the intersection of technology and democracy. Since then, the VTP has sponsored a series of conferences, reports, and consultations aimed at bringing the best in objective, scientific analysis to the problem of applying the best technology to the improvement of voting in the United States.
Specific tasks have included evaluating the reliability of existing voting technologies and administrative practices, proposing objective and reliable quantitative guidelines for assessing voting technology reliability, and proposing specific principles for the design of new voting technologies.
Primary funding for the VTP has been provided by a series of grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.