[ale] OT: Talks about Electronic Voting

[Brian Pitts]

Hi,

I thought the list might like to know that distinguished computer
scientist Barbara Simons is visiting local universities next week to
talk about electronic voting.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008
GA Tech, Physics S204, 3:00 pm

Thursday, September 11, 2008
Emory, Mathematics and Science Center, Room W301. 4PM

Friday, September 12, 2008
UGA, Boyd 328, 3:30PM

Almost $4 billion in federal dollars, provided by the 2002 Help America
Vote Act (HAVA), resulted in the initial widespread purchase of
paperless computerized voting systems (Direct Recording Electronic or
DREs) by many states, including Georgia.  Election officials were told
that DREs would be cheaper than alternative voting systems, a claim that
ignored the costs of testing and secure storage, as well as very
expensive annual maintenance contracts.  They were told that DREs had
been extensively tested and that the certification process guaranteed
that the machines were reliable and secure.  They were also told that
DREs would allow people with disabilities to vote independently.  In
some cases officials were threatened with lawsuits or actually sued by
certain disability rights groups if they expressed hesitation at
purchasing DREs.
	However, early independent security studies, followed by recent results
from California’s “Top-to-Bottom Review” have revealed that the DREs
that were tested by California – all of which had been federally
qualified and state certified – are poorly designed, badly programmed,
insecure, unreliable, and at times very difficult for people with
disabilities to use.  As a result the California Secretary of State
Debra Bowen decertified all of the tested systems.  While she
recertified them, her conditional recertification orders, which contain
long lists of detected problems, have still longer lists of conditions,
some quite arduous, that must be met.
HAVA also required each state to create a statewide computerized
database of all registered voters. Congressional Democrats and
Republicans supported the computerized databases, because they felt the
databases would prevent widespread voter disenfranchisement or voting by
illegal aliens, respectively.  However, if the databases are not secure
and properly monitored, it will be possible to strip large numbers of
voters’ names from the databases or to pad the databases with the names
of non-citizens.
We shall discuss some of the voting technologies that will be used in
November, as well as national efforts to make our elections more secure
and accurate through the use of voter verified paper ballots.  We shall
also review the situation in Georgia.  Because Georgia still uses
paperless Diebold DREs, there will be no way to conduct an audit or
recount of the November 2008 election in Georgia.

An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons was recently appointed to
the Board of Advisors of the federal Election Assistance Commission.
She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was
convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on
Internet Voting in 2001.  She also participated on the Security Peer
Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project
(SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE
because of security concerns.  Simons co-chaired the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) study of statewide databases of registered
voters.  Simons and Doug Jones are co-authoring a book on voting machines.
Simons was President of ACM from July 1998 until June 2000.  She founded
ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many
years as the Chair or co-Chair of USACM.   In 2005 Simons became the
first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from
the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley.  She is also a Fellow of
ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She
received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer
Science Department, the Distinguished Service Award from Computing
Research Association, the Making a Difference Award from ACM’s Special
Interest Group on Computing and Society, the Norbert Wiener Award from
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding
Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.  She was selected by C|NET as one of its 26
Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100
Women in Computing.”  Science Magazine featured her in a special edition
on women in science.
Simons served on the President’s Export Council’s Subcommittee on
Encryption and on the Information Technology-Sector of the President's
Council on the Year 2000 Conversion.  She is on the Board of Directors
of VerifiedVoting.org.  She has also been on the boards of the U. C.
Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center,
Public Knowledge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as the
Advisory Council of the Public Interest Registry’s ORG.  She has
testified before both the U.S. and state legislatures and at government
sponsored hearings.  She was runner-up in the first election for the
North America seat on the ICANN Board.
Simons co-founded the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities in the
Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley.  She is also on the Boards
of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) and the Berkeley
Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT), groups
that work at increasing participation in computer science of
underrepresented minorities.
Simons earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of
California, Berkeley.  Her dissertation solved a major open problem in
scheduling theory. In 1980, she became a Research Staff Member at IBM's
San Jose Research Center (now Almaden).  In 1992, she joined IBM's
Applications Development Technology Institute as a Senior Programmer and
subsequently served as Senior Technology Advisor for IBM Global
Services.  Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization,
algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory.  Her work on clock
synchronization won an IBM Research Division Award.  She holds several
patents and has authored or co-authored a book and numerous technical
papers.  She is retired from IBM Research.