Barbara Simons
Thursday, March 3, 2005
1131 Kemper Hall
3 :10-4:00 p.m.
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. They were told that DREs had been extensively
tested and that the certification process guaranteed that the machines
were reliable and secure. No mention was made of the significant costs
of testing and of secure storage of DREs; no mention was made of the inadequacy
of the testing and certification processes, to say nothing of the difficulty
of creating bug-free software.
We will discuss some of the technical issues relating to DREs and Internet
voting, describe some alternative technical approaches, review some horror
stories, and consider legislative efforts to repair the damage caused
by the purchase of voting machines that have major security and reliability
problems.
Bio
Barbara Simons earned her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, and was a computer science researcher at IBM Research, where she worked on compiler optimization, algorithm analysis, and scheduling theory. A former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Simons founded ACM's US Public Policy Committee (USACM) and served for many years as chair or co-chair of USACM. She was a member of the NSF panel on Internet Voting, the security peer review group for the DoD's Internet voting project (SERVE), the President's Export Council's Subcommittee on Encryption, and the President's Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on several Boards of Directors, including the U.C. Berkeley Engineering Fund and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as the Advisory Board of the Oxford Internet Institute and the Public Interest Registry's .ORG Advisory Council. She has testified before both the U.S. and the California legislatures. She is 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 the Computing Research Association, 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.