Mr. Perez brings 15-years of experience in the design, development, certification, and delivery of commercial voting systems. He will apply this experience to advance the nonprofit Institute’s cause to develop public technology and open standards that will result in increased integrity, lower cost, and easier to use election and voting systems. Edward will focus on advancing “critical democracy infrastructure” based on security-centric engineering, user-centered design, and open technology standards.

“Eddie Perez joining the Institute is an important development for the progress of our research and development mission to offer public technology that will serve as a reference model for how to truly innovate election technology in the digital age,” said Gregory Miller, co-founder of the OSET Institute. “This is an ideal post-commercial career move for Eddie, who is passionate about technology's role in defending democracy.” Uniquely for the OSET leadership team, Mr. Perez combines nearly two decades of technology management experience with undergraduate and graduate degrees in government and political science.

“My departure from Hart InterCivic was essentially a retirement from the commercial sector, and I remain positive about the efforts that Hart is making as the only vendor moving in the right direction with regard to a security-centric model, facilitated by a ground-up rewrite that I helped foster,” said Perez. “Joining the OSET Institute will enable me to fully pursue passions I have about defending our critical democracy infrastructure in the digital age. I look forward to partnering with OSET Institute’s CTO to do just that.”

OSET CTO John Sebes observed, “Eddie’s experience, mindset and outlook will be pivotal to our cause to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes by offering new publicly available innovations for the commercial world to adopt, adapt, and deploy.”

Mr. Perez’s activities start today as he provides subject matter expertise to NBC News as part of the OSET election technology analyst team announced last week.