Colloquium Details
Distinguished Lecture Series - Computerized Voting Machines: Who is Counting your Vote?
| Author: | Barbara Simons |
|---|---|
| Date: | March 13, 2008 |
| Time: | 19:00 |
| Location: | UO Knight School of Law, Room 110 |
Abstract
As a result of Florida 2000, some people concluded that paper ballots simply couldn't be counted, even though businesses, banks, racetracks, lottery systems, and other entities in our society count and deal with paper all the time. Instead, paperless computerized voting systems (Direct Recording Electronic or DREs) were touted as the solution to "the Florida problem."
Election officials were told that DREs in the long run 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, recent results from California's "Top-to-Bottom Review" have revealed that the DREs that were tested - all of which had been federally qualified and state certified - are poorly designed, badly programmed, insecure, unreliable, and at times impossible 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 if the machines are to be used in the upcoming primary election.
We will examine some of the technical issues relating to DREs and Internet voting, discuss the advantages of optical scan + ballot marking systems, review some horror stories, and discuss ongoing legislative efforts aimed at making voting systems more secure and mandating random manual audits for all federal elections.
Biography
An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons 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 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 also co-chaired the ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) study of statewide databases of registered voters. Simons and Doug Jones are co-authoring a book on voting machines to be published by PoliPoint.
Simons was President of ACM, the nation's oldest and largest educational and scientific society for computing professionals, 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 (SIGCAS), 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 (EFF). 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 and of Public Knowledge. In 2006 she stepped down from the boards of the U. C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, 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 the California 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.