Vanessa Teague

Vanessa combines practical security analysis with open-source tools for checking election outcomes. Democracy Developers’ extensions to Colorado’s audit software were used successfully in local elections in 2025, bringing research on preferential voting into operational use. Alongside discoveries of weaknesses in deployed voting systems, this work makes independent verification a practical part of assessing software quality where public trust is at stake.

Vanessa Teague is a cryptographer at Thinking Cybersecurity and an Adjunct Professor at UNSW Sydney, based in Melbourne. Holding an honours science degree from the University of Melbourne and a PhD from Stanford University, Vanessa studies how cryptography can protect security and privacy in matters of public interest, including elections and government data. Practical applications combine open research, scrutiny of deployed voting systems and methods for checking election results independently of software claims.

Vanessa founded Democracy Developers to build open-source software supporting democracy. The team extended Colorado’s election audit software to support instant runoff voting using techniques developed in Australia, running the software successfully in local elections in 2025. Investigations have also co-discovered serious cryptographic weaknesses in deployed electronic voting systems across New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland, alongside privacy failures in an Australian public health dataset, establishing independent verification as an essential standard for software quality.