History and Significance of the TTBR and PEASWG
Debra Bowen
Voting Village @ DEF CON 33 · Day 1 · Voting Village
This talk, delivered by the Honorable Debra Bowen, former Secretary of State of California, delves into the foundational work that reshaped election security in the United States: the **Top-to-Bottom Review (TTBR)** and the **Post-Election Audits Standards Working Group (PEASWG)**. Bowen, who served as California's Secretary of State from 2007 to 2015, recounts the political courage and technical foresight required to challenge the status quo of voting systems. Her initiatives were pivotal in exposing vulnerabilities in election technology and establishing robust, evidence-based methodologies for ensuring election integrity.
AI review
A well-delivered historical retrospective from someone who actually held the levers — Bowen's TTBR and PEASWG work genuinely mattered, and her firsthand account of forcing source code access from hostile vendors and decertifying DREs carries real authority. The content is substantive for its lane (case study / war story), but the talk is looking backward at ~15-year-old work rather than forward, and the 'technical deep dive' is illustrative rather than instructive — the eBay Diebold cards story and the Phillips-head-screws anecdote are good color, not transferable tradecraft.