VerifiedVoting.org a non-partisan non-profit organization that advocates for legislation and regulation that promotes accuracy, transparency and verifiability of elections. We believe the integrity and strength of our democracy relies on citizen’s trust that each vote be counted as cast. Our primary concern lies in ensuring that the means for verifying election outcomes is in place and used for that purpose. We also focus on the reliability and security of voting systems. We connect those who are making and implementing policy that shapes how we vote to those who understand the particular risks associated with the emerging digital landscape, particularly on-line and electronic voting.
Verified Voting is uniquely qualified to address this component of voting rights, as we excel in bridging the key stakeholder groups it takes to make change on these issues: election officials, voter advocates, lawmakers, technologists, researchers and the media. Our operational strategy is to bring together policy-makers and officials who are designing and implementing voting-related legislation and regulations, with the technology experts who comprehend the risks associated with the emerging digital landscape, particularly the on-line and electronic elements in voting. We connect advocates and researchers, the media and the public to provide greater understanding of these complex issues.
At Verified Voting we leverage our technology expertise and relationships with secretaries of state and election officials to focus on the top priorities of ensuring auditable systems are in place, ensuring audits are conducted, eliminating or greatly reducing the use of systems that cannot be audited nor secured, especially Internet voting, and providing an essential resource of voting technology information to the media, advocates, voters, researchers, election officials and the general public.
Since its founding by David L. Dill, Verified Voting has generated national attention developed actionable solutions, and brought about measurable results. From early 2003 to early 2010, we went from 2 to 34 states with a requirement for voters to be able to verify their vote on a paper record or ballot, and another 6 that purchased voter-verifiable systems even without a statutory requirement. We have assisted 10+ states with post-election audit provisions and helped pass requirements for more; this year half the states will do a post-election audit of some kind.
| 2003 | ||
| January • | Verified Voting founder David Dill issues a Resolution on Electronic Voting, now with 10,000+ endorsers including top computer security experts and elected officials. | |
| Spring • | California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley appoints Dill to the newly formed Ad Hoc Task Force on Touch Screen Voting. | |
| July • | Dill creates VerifiedVoting.org website and assembles a team of computer security experts to study Diebold e-voting software. The resulting Johns Hopkins/Rice University report documents extensive security flaws with Diebold equipment. | |
| 2004 | ||
| January • | Verified Voting’s education and advocacy in California serves as an important catalyst in prompting then Secretary of State Kevin Shelley to call for voter-verified paper ballots on all new e-voting equipment in California by July 2005 and on all existing equipment by July 2006. | |
| February • | The Verified Voting Foundation (VVF) incorporates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and becomes a hub of verified voting educational activities. | |
| VVF board member Barbara Simons, advisory board member Aviel D. Rubin, and others author report on the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) for internet voting by Americans serving overseas during the November 2004 elections. Pentagon scrapped the project. | ||
| May • | National media exposure featuring VVF staff, board members, and volunteers. Professor Dill appears on Lou Dobbs Tonight (CNN), Jim Lehrer, and other national TV and radio programs. | |
| October • | VVF publishes the Verifier Map with voting system data and election official contact information for voting jurisdictions across the country. | |
| November • | The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) provides real-time reports of Election Day incidents, supporting national election protection work. The first national database of its kind, EIRS loggs tens of thousands of reports about polling places incidents and voting system issues. TechWatch technologists trained by VVF are on-call during Election Day in priority states. | |
| VVF awards $46,000 in grants to seven state and local organizations working on verified voting issues due to the generosity of a major donor. The Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition based in Miami, Florida, organizes a landmark poll closing project to observe ballot accounting procedures. | ||
| December • | Citing incident reports collected in the Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS), Congressional Reps. Conyers, Nadler and Wexler recommend that the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) conduct an audit of the 2004 election. | |
| 2005 | ||
| February • | VVF staff members speak at National Association of Secretaries of State conference in Washington, D.C. | |
| April • | U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) contacts Verified Voting Foundation about providing input to their audit of the 2004 election. | |
| Verified Voting founder David Dill testifies to the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform in Washington, D.C. | ||
| June • | Verified Voting founder David Dill testifies as invited witness at the June 21 hearings of the U.S. Senate Rules Committee in Washington, D.C. | |
| July • | Professor Dill provides invited testimony to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), urging both verification and accessibility. | |
| August • | VVF publishes “Accessible and Verifiable Voting Technology: A Feature Comparison” detailed evaluation of the disability access features of voting systems that provide a voter-verified paper record. | |
| September • | VVF provides comments on the EAC’s new “Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines”. | |
| October • | VVF contributes data to the report via EIRS for a GAO report on election security and reliability concerns. VVF supported Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition’s report on its poll closing project cited by the GAO. | |
| 2006 | ||
| January • | VVF supports efforts in Connecticut to halt the purchase of electronic voting machines and reopen the search for HAVA-compliant technology. | |
| Verified Voting founder David Dill provides testimony to a California Senate hearing on compliance with HAVA. | ||
| March • | VVF releases commentary on voting systems purchases and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), designed to provide guidance to state and county election officials, as well as community activists, in understanding what is and is not allowed under HAVA. | |
| October • | Verified Voting publishes an updated Verifier Map with voting system data and election official contact information for voting jurisdictions across the country. | |
| November • | Verified Voting participates in the Election Protection Coalition’s 2006 efforts. | |
| 2007 | ||
| March • | Verified Voting President Pamela Smith testifies to the US House of Representatives Committee on House Administration, Elections Subcommittee regarding post-election audits. | |
| April • | Verified Voting President Pamela Smith participates in the 1st EAC Cost of Testing and Certification Summit in Denver, CO. | |
| August • | Verified Voting provides information to Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson regarding voting system security and auditability issues, resulting in significant movement in the state toward optical scan. | |
| October • | VVF collaborates with partner groups to organize and host the nation’s first Post-Election Audit Summit bringing together diverse stakeholders including technologists, statisticians, election officials, advocates and others to discuss the state of post-election auditing in the nation and how to move the process forward. | |
| 2008 | ||
| January • | Verified Voting President Pamela Smith presents a perspective on upcoming federal election to journalists by Pew Center on the States, San Francisco. | |
| April • | VVF Board Member Barbara Simons participates in an EAC Advocacy Roundtable discussion regarding the draft Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. | |
| May • | Verified Voting President Pamela Smith participates in an EAC Interdisciplinary Roundtable discussion regarding the draft Voluntary Voting System Guidelines. | |
| Verified Voting submits comments to the EAC regarding Voluntary Voting System Guidelines VVSG. | ||
| August • | VerifiedVoting.org contributes to the successful effort stall a flawed electronic verification legislation in Senate. | |
| September • | Verified Voting publishes the Technologists Statement on Internet Voting. | |
| Verified Voting President Pamela Smith serves as executive editor for the team developing the Principles and Best Practices for Post Election Audits. | ||
| October • | VVF, in collaboration with Common Cause and The Brennan Center, publishes a 50 State report – “Is America Ready to Vote?”, which ranks States’ performance in voter-verified paper ballots, post-election manual audits, ballot accounting / reconciliation and contingency plans such as emergency paper ballots in machine jurisdictions. | |
| Verified Voting publishes an updated Verifier Map with election data and voter-registration statistics for voting jurisdictions across the country. | ||
| November • | VVF partners with EARC to produce “Election Workers Survey” questionnaire. | |
| VVF participates in the Election Protection Coalition’s 2008 efforts; training e-voting specialists for the Election Protection Coalition’s 1-866-OURVOTE voter hot line, and serving on Election Day as special advisors at OURVOTE call centers, collecting over 1900 calls reporting equipment problems. | ||
| December • | VerifiedVoting.org advocates successfully for the defeat of a repeal of New Jersey’s voter-verified paper record requirement. | |
| 2009 | ||
| January • | Verified Voting President Pamela Smith participates as the only election integrity advocate invited to the 2nd EAC Cost of Testing/Certification meeting, Miami Beach. | |
| February • | Information provided by VerifiedVoting.org is effective in supported opposition to internet voting legislation in Washington State. | |
| VerifiedVoting.org assists Maryland advocates with model language for post-election audits. | ||
| March • | VerifiedVoting.org assists with audit legislation in Iowa, which passes the State House unanimously. | |
| Information provided by VerifiedVoting.org is effective in assisting Maryland activists in preserving their core requirement for voter-verified paper ballots. | ||
| May • | Information provided by VerifiedVoting.org helps defeat a provision that would have required Illinois to identify a vendor to provide Internet voting in the state for all voters. | |
| June • | VerifiedVoting.org’s support and guidance of election integrity advocates in Tennessee results in passage of the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act. | |
| July • | VerifiedVoting.org helps develop audit legislation for the District of Columbia, which later was signed into law. | |
| October • | VVF participates in Alexandria meeting on election audits and served on drafting committee for letters to NIST on standard data formats. | |
| Verified Voting gives a presentation at a National Institute of Standards and Technology meeting on standard data formats. | ||
| VVF contributes to an op-ed in the Richmond Dispatch by Jeannemarie Devolites-Davis calling for paper ballots and to finish the work started with a ban on DRE in Virginia. | ||
| December • | VVF submits comments for the FCC’s National Broadband Initiative, on Internet Voting. | |
| 2010 | ||
| February • | VerifiedVoting.org contributes to the defeat of a second attempt to repeal Virginia’s DRE ban. | |
| March • | VVF President Pamela Smith participates in Overseas Vote Foundation UOCAVA Summit “Internet Voting Debate” in Munich. | |
| VVF hosts landmark “Small Batch Audit Meeting” in Washington DC with Common Cause, bringing together statisticians, election officials, voting system vendors, election audit specialists and technologists to advance the cause of efficient, effective audits. | ||
| May • | VVF comments on the merger of two largest voting system vendors, Premier (formerly Diebold) and ES&S. VVF staff and board members subsequently participate in a Merger Task Force and meetings with the Department of Justice and Admininistration officials resulting in greater awareness and a better settlement. | |
| June • | VVF submits comments to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on draft Information System Security Best Practices for UOCAVA Supporting Systems. | |
| July/August • | VVF supports the UOCAVA Summit meeting development process. | |
| 2011 | ||
| March • | Verified Voting Founation participates in the UOCAVA Blank Ballot Security conference hosted by the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), NIST and the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), and were instrumental in helping bring about that event. | |
| Spring • | Verified Voting develops a smartphone “app” to help would-be voters more readily participate in upcoming 2012 elections by giving them information they need about where and on what voting system to vote, how to register, where to get help and much more. | |
| July • | Verified Voting Foundation participates in a forum on how to improve voter registration database issues in Sacramento, hosted by The Pew Center on the States. | |
| Verified Voting’s Advisory Board is joined by three new elections and technology experts: Philip Stark, Harri Hursti and Ron Rivest. | ||
| 2012 | ||
| February • | Verified Voting Testifies to the Maryland Board of Elections regarding a proposed system for remote absentee voting. | |
| June • | Verified Voting Foundation partners with George Washington University’s Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute to present a panel discussion on voting technology, “Is America Ready to Vote on the Internet”. | |
| July • | Verified Voting Foundation releases an updated version of the 2008 50 State report on requirements and practices for election management. | |
| November • | Verified Voting launches new website. |
The Verified Voting Board of Directors is responsible for strategic planning and oversight of the organization. Many directors are notable figures in computer science, business, the media, and civic affairs. Verified Voting is currently seeking additional board members who have expertise in fundraising and bring diverse perspective and backgrounds to the organization.
Barbara Simons, Ph.D., Board Chair
An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. 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 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 Douglas W. Jones co-authored the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?“
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 Research.
Cindy Cohn
As the legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Cindy Cohn is responsible for overseeing the EFF’s overall legal strategy. She first became involved with EFF as the lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, which successfully challenged U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. In 1997, she was named one of California Lawyer magazine’s “lawyers of the year.” Cohn is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and did her undergraduate work at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. For ten years prior to joining EFF, she was a civil litigator in private practice handling Internet-related cases, including domain name disputes, suits arising from unsolicited commercial e-mail (“spam”), and challenges to government efforts to gather information from Internet Service Providers about their customers.
David L. Dill, Ph.D.
David L. Dill, Ph.D., provides visibility, credentials, and academic expertise on the subject of voting machines and computer science. He is the organization’s founder. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). His primary research interests relate to the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for hard real-time systems. He was the Chair of the Computer-Aided Verification Conference held at Stanford University in 1994. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was the Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation.
Prof. Dill’s Ph.D. thesis, “Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical Verification of Speed Independent Circuits” was named as a Distinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988. He was the recipient of an Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research in 1991. He has received Best Paper awards at International Conference on Computer Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993 and 1998. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems.
Since becoming involved in the electronic voting controversy, Prof. Dill has served on the California Secretary of State’s Ad Hoc Task Force on Touch-Screen Voting and currently serves on the IEEE P1583 Committee and Santa Clara County’s Citizen’s DRE Oversight Board. In December of 2003, Prof. Dill was one of a select group of presenters at the Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In April 2005, he testified before the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, and in July 2005, before the Rules Committee of the U.S. Senate.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Ph.D.
Joseph Lorenzo Hall is the Senior Staff Technologist at at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the internet remains free, open and innovative. Prior to joining CDT in late 2012, Hall was a postdoctoral research fellow with Helen Nissenbaum at New York University, Ed Felten at Princeton University and Deirdre Mulligan at University of California, Berkeley.
Hall’s current work focuses on policy mechanisms that promote trustworthiness and transparency in information systems, as core functions of society and government become networked and computerized. Hall’s work at CDT is split between Consumer Privacy, Health Privacy and National Security. Hall received his Ph.D. in information systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2008. His Ph.D. thesis used electronic voting as a critical case study in digital government transparency. In his postdoctoral work, he developed techniques to increase the efficiency and usability of accountability mechanisms in electronic elections. Hall holds master’s degrees in astrophysics and information systems from UC Berkeley and was a founding member of the National Science Foundation’s ACCURATE Center (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). He has served as an expert on independent teams invited by the States of California, Ohio and Maryland to analyze legal, privacy, security, usability and economic aspects of voting systems. In 2012, Hall received the John Gideon Memorial Award from the Election Verification Network for contributions to election verification.
Dr. David Jefferson, Ph. D., Board Vice-Chair
Dr. David Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he works on supercomputing applications. But he has also been active in research at the intersection of the computing and public elections for well over a decade. In 1994, while at Digital Equipment Corporation, he oversaw development of the California Election Server, the first web server anywhere to provide online voter information on candidates and issues. It set what was then a world traffic record of 1 million hits in a 24 hour period. In 1995 he helped develop, in cooperation with the California Voter Foundation, the first online database of campaign finance information ever, for the San Francisco municipal election of that year. They repeated it at the state level in 1998 for the California general election. These efforts played a large role in convincing California, and eventually most other states, to pass laws requiring campaign finance disclosure information to be filed electronically, instead of on paper, and published on the Internet before the election.
In 1999 he served as chair of the technical committee of the Secretary of State Bill Jones’ task force on Internet voting, whose report was the first major study of the subject ever published. He subsequently served on the National Science Foundation-Internet Policy Institute panel on Internet voting, and testified to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform organized by presidents Carter and Ford. He has also consulted with numerous agencies and states on the subject of voting security, including the FEC and the Department of Defense. He is also coauthor of the SERVE Security Report (servesecurityreport.org), which detailed the security vulnerabilities in the Defense Department’s proposed Internet voting system in 2004 and led to the cancellation of the program.
In 2003 he was a member of the California Secretary of State’s task force on Touchscreen Voting, whose recommendations led eventually to voter verified audit trails for electronic voting machines in California. Since then he has served as the chair of the Secretary of State’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB) under Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, and then as chair of its successor, the Voting Systems Technology Assessment and Advisory Board (VSTAAB) under Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. Under Secretary of State Debra Bowen he served as chair of the Post-election Audit Standards Working Group that worked in parallel with the Top to Bottom Review of California voting systems. He has been a member and past Chair of the board of directors of the California Voter Foundation for 12 years. From 1980 to 1994 Dr. Jefferson was a computer science professor, first at USC and then at UCLA, where he conducted research in parallel computation and simulation. He is well known for the co-invention of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation and has also published research in operating systems, evolution, and artificial life.
Ron Rivest, Ph.D.
Ron Rivest, Ph.D. is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT’s Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab’s Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is a founder of RSA Data Security and an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a co-founder of Verisign and of Peppercoin. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, and algorithms. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptographic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also on the EPIC Advisory Board.
Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he was awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received, together with Shamir and Adleman, the 2002 ACM Turing Award and the 2009 NEC C&C Prize. He received an honorary degree from the University of Rome. He is a Fellow of the World Technology Network and a Finalist for the 2002 World Technology Award for Communications Technology. In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award; in 2007, he received both the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference “Distinguished Innovator” award and the Marconi Prize. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from the Louvain School of Engineering at the Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL). In 2010, he was awarded MIT’s Kilian Faculty Achievement Award. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and served as a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the Financial Cryptography Association.
Kevin Shelley
Kevin Shelley is a former California Secretary of State and State Assembly leader recognized as an advocate for working people, consumers and investors. Mr. Shelley’s political involvement began in 1978 as a staff member to U.S. Representatives Phil and Sala Burton. He then played a key role in electing their successor, current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, in 1987. His own political career began in 1990, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Elected to the California State Assembly in 1996, he championed the rights of workers and fought to protect civil rights. Among his accomplishments, he improved conditions at nursing homes, drafted new corporate accountability requirements and created a restitution fund for victims of corporate fraud.
Mr. Shelley, who spent five of his six years in the State Assembly as Majority Leader, won election for Secretary of State in November 2002. As the state’s Chief Election Officer, he is credited with improving voter participation, calmly overseeing the historic recall election, and decertifying problematic electronic voting machines. He established the first in the nation standards for accessible voter-verified paper audit trails to be used with direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in California. Since 2005, Mr. Shelley has been representing consumers and plaintiffs in civil litigation. He began working with Berman DeValerio in 2006. He is the son of Jack Shelley, a former San Francisco mayor, U.S. congressman and California state senator.
Pamela Smith
Pamela Smith is President of Verified Voting, a non-partisan nonprofit working to safeguard elections in the digital age. She provides information and public testimony on verified voting issues at federal and state levels throughout the US, including to the US House of Representatives Committee on House Administration. She oversees an extensive information resource on election equipment and the regulations governing its use at the federal level and across the 50 states. Ms. Smith is co-editor of the Principles and Best Practices in Post Election Audits, co-author of “Counting Votes 2012: A State By State Look at Election Preparedness” and the author of an introductory chapter on audits for Confirming Elections: Creating Confidence and Integrity through Election Auditing. She has been a small business and marketing consultant and nonprofit executive for a Hispanic educational organization working on first language literacy and adult learning.
Philip B. Stark, Ph.D.
Philip B. Stark is Professor and chair of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He served on California Secretary of State Bowen’s Post Election Audit Standards Working Group. He developed the notion of “risk-limiting audits.” He is working with the Secretaries of State of California and Colorado to develop and test standard procedures for risk-limiting audits. Dr. Stark has published more than one hundred articles and books, served on the editorial board of several scientific journals, and lectured at universities and professional societies in seventeen countries. He has consulted for the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the California Attorney General, the California Highway Patrol, and the Illinois State Attorney. He has testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Census; the State of California Senate Committee on Elections, Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments; the State of California Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting; and the State of California Senate Committee on Natural Resources. In 2011, Dr. Stark received the University of California Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for Research in the Public Interest.
Verified Voting’s goals and strategies have been developed in consultation with many others who are on our Board of Advisors. All members of our Board of Directors are also on the advisory board.
Lillie Coney is Associate Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization in Washington, DC. EPIC was established to focus public attention on civil liberties issues. Ms. Coney joined EPIC in 2004 to head up the organization’s voting and privacy project. In 2005, she was named Associate Director. In 2006, Ms. Coney was the organizing force behind the first research conducted in a polling location to measure the usability of optical-scan and touch screen voting systems resulted in the report, Voting Technology, Election Administration, and Voter Performance, published by Stein, Vonnahme, Byrne, and Wallach (2008). In October 2008, EPIC’s voting project published E-Deceptive Campaign Practices Report: Internet Technology and Democracy 2.0, the first report to review technology as a tool for online deceptive campaign practices. The report reviewed the potential for abuse of Internet technology in an election context, and made recommendations for steps that could be taken by Election Protection, Election Administrators, and voters to protect the integrity of the upcoming election. In 2009, she coordinated and lead the audit review of the Punchscan Voting Systems use in the November 2009, Takoma Park Municipal election. She has written and spoken extensively on the subject of voting technology and privacy. She has published several law and policy journal articles on elections and voting systems. Ms. Coney serves in an advisory capacity to ACCURATE, Voting System Performance Rating, and Open Voting Consortium. She is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Public Policy Committee.
Larry Diamond
Jeremy Epstein, is a Senior Computer Scientist with SRI International in Arlington VA. He’s been a researcher in voting system security for nearly a decade, and one of the authors of the EAC’s risk assessment model research program. He’s been a consultant to the Kentucky Attorney General, an appointed member of two Virginia legislative committees, an advisor to the DC City Council, and an advisor to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, all on issues relating to voting system security. He has been nominated as the IEEE representative on the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, which advises the Election Assistance Commission on voting system security standards. Jeremy is experienced in how commercial technology is built, having spent nine years as an executive responsible for product security at a mid-size software vendor. Jeremy holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University.
Michael J. Fischer, Ph.D. has been Professor of Computer Science at Yale University since 1981. He has an M.A. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1968) from Harvard University. Professor Fischer supervised Josh Benaloh‘s dissertation, “Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections” (1987), which was the first distributed voting protocol to simultaneously achieve voter privacy and voter verifiability. Professor Fischer is a founding member of TrueVoteCT.org, a public-service organization that helped to bring verifiable optical scan voting technology to Connecticut. He was appointed by Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell in 2005 to the short-lived Voting Technology Standards Board, where he was elected Vice-chair by its members. His research interests include theory of distributed and parallel computing, cryptography, and computer security.
J. Alex Halderman, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. His research spans applied computer security and tech-centric public policy, including topics such as software security, data privacy, electronic voting, censorship resistance, digital rights management, and cybercrime, as well as technological aspects of intellectual property law and government regulation. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Harri Hursti, Chief Technology Officer of SafelyLocked LLC, is one of the world’s leading experts on voting systems and is known for his demonstration of the vulnerability of America’s voting systems in the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy”. He has been one of the lead technical resources in the major independent technical reviews of America’s voting systems: Ohio’s Sec. of State-ordered EVEREST Study and the New Jersey’s Superior Court judge-ordered review of the Sequoia voting machines. Harri is the 2009 recipient of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his role in demonstrating the vulnerability of America’s electronic voting machines.
Candice Hoke, founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University, Associate Professor of Law (Election, Regulatory, and Employment Law). Background: a research Team Leader for CA Secretary of State’s landmark scientific study of voting systems (2007); member, American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law Advisory Commission (2007- ); proposed and led the first post-election audit in Ohio (Cuyahoga, November 2006), testified to Congress on the critical need for independent election auditing to rebuild public trust in the election system.
Roger G. Johnston, Ph.D., CPP, is Leader of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. He was founder and head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1992 to 2007.Johnston has provided consulting, training, vulnerability assessments, R&D, and security solutions for more than 50 government and international agencies, private companies, and NGOs. Roger graduated from Carleton College (1977), and received M.S. & Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Colorado (1983). He has authored over 165 technical papers and 90 invited talks (including 6 Keynote Addresses), holds 10 U.S. patents, and serves as Editor of the Journal of Physical Security.
Douglas W. Jones, Ph.D. is a computer scientist at the University of Iowa. His research focuses primarily on computer security, particularly electronic voting. Together with Barbara Simons, Jones has published a book on electronic voting entitled Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?. Jones’s most widely cited work centers on the evaluation of priority queue implementations. This work has been credited with helping relaunch the empirical study of algorithm performance.[3] In related work, Jones applied splay trees to data compression and developed algorithms for applying parallel computing to discrete event simulation. Jones’s PhD thesis was in the area of capability-based addressing, and he has occasionally published on other aspects of computer architecture. ]He has published work on computer architecture on an occasional basis, such as his proposal for a one instruction set computer. Jones’ involvement with electronic voting research began in 1994, when he was appointed to the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems. He chaired the board from 1999 to 2003, and has testified before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the United States House Committee on Science and the Federal Election Commission on voting issues. In 2005 he participated as an election observer for the presidential election in Kazakhstan. Jones was the technical advisor for HBO’s documentary on electronic voting machine issues, “Hacking Democracy“, that was released in 2006. He was a member of the ACCURATE electronic voting project from 2005 to 2011. On Dec. 11, 2009, the Election Assistance Commission appointed Douglas Jones to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee. Jones received a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and 1980 respectively.
Lou Katz, Ph.D. has a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Wisconsin, was a molecular biologist at MIT and the Director of the Computer Graphics Facility in the Department of Biology, Columbia University and Director of the Core Computer Facility at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of Computing Resources in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. As one of the founders of the Usenix Association, he served as its first President and also as a director, and he also served as a member of the Executive Committee of ACM/Siggraph. He is experienced in computer systems and network management, database and email systems, and in evaluating the security aspects of software prior to deployment on internet-facing servers.
Douglas A. Kellner is Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections. He was appointed in December 2005. Prior to becoming Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections, he served as the Democratic commissioner from Manhattan on the New York City Board of Elections from 1993 to 2005. Kellner was one of the first proponents of a voter verifiable paper audit trail for electronic voting machines. He was the leader of the opposition to New York City’s contract to purchase unverifiable direct recording electronic voting machines. Kellner is a partner in the law firm of Kellner Herlihy Getty & Friedman, LLP. He specializes in the area of Real Estate Litigation and represents a large number of tenants groups, cooperatives, and some non-profit institutional landlords. Mr. Kellner received considerable attention in 1986 when he revived New York’s Bawdy House Law, first enacted in 1840, and used it as a device where neighbors could seek to evict drug dealers. His use of this overlooked law for that purpose was quickly copied by district attorneys and housing authorities throughout the country.
Justin Moore, Ph.D., is a Senior Software Engineer with Google in Mountain View, CA. He has been a member of the Datacenter Software team since 2006, working to improve the efficiency of Google’s fleet of datacenters. In his spare “20%” time at Google, he has worked with the Voting Information Project to help standardize the publication of election-related data and provide voters with better tools for accessing this information. His PhD dissertation at Duke University explored how to schedule jobs in a datacenter with the goal of reducing the total cost of ownership; this was achieved by modeling and predicting the power, cooling, and hardware reliability effects of running computational tasks on different servers. Also while at Duke, he was an expert witness to both the North Carolina and Virginia state legislative subcommittees on voting reform. His contributions in North Carolina helped pass a comprehensive election reform bill in 2005 that has served as a model for dozens of other state-level reforms.
Peter Neumann, Ph.D. has doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt. After 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the 1960s, during which he was heavily involved in the Multics development jointly with MIT and Honeywell, he has been in SRI’s Computer Science Lab since September 1971. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, has been responsible for CACM’s Inside Risks columns monthly from 1990 to 2007, tri-annually since then, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity.
Aviel D. Rubin, Ph.D. is Professor of Computer Science and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Rubin was a research scientist at AT&T Labs. Rubin has testified before the U.S. House and Senate on multiple occasions, and he is author of several books including Brave New Ballot (Random House, 2006) Firewalls and Internet Security, second edition (with Bill Cheswick and Steve Bellovin, Addison Wesley, 2003), White-Hat Security Arsenal (Addison Wesley, 2001), and Web Security Sourcebook (with Dan Geer and Marcus Ranum, John Wiley & Sons, 1997). He is Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Associate Editor of IEEE Security & Privacy, and an Advisory Board member of Springer’s Information Security and Cryptography Book Series. In January, 2004 Baltimore Magazine name Rubin a Baltimorean of the Year for his work in safeguarding the integrity of our election process, and he is also the recipient of the 2004 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. Rubin has a B.S, (’89), M.S.E (’91), and Ph.D. (’94) from the University of Michigan.
Ion Sancho is the Supervisor of Elections for Leon County, Florida. Serving since January 1989, he has been reelected to five additional terms. One of only three (out of 67) supervisors of elections in Florida without party affiliation, Mr. Sancho has devoted special attention to studying voting technologies and increasing citizen participation in our electoral system. Under his administration Leon County’s voter turnout percentage has consistently ranked among the highest of Florida’s 67 counties, with a record setting 86% turnout in the November 2008 General Election. Mr. Sancho was appointed by the Florida Supreme Court in December of 2000 as the technical expert to oversee the Florida Recount effort and was recognized by the Leon County Board of County Commissioners for providing “statistically the cleanest county elections in the state” during that infamous election. In 2005, Mr. Sancho sanctioned the first tests of voting machines by voting integrity experts, independent of the vendors. His action were captured in the 2007 Emmy nominated film, “Hacking Democracy.”
Ion Sancho was the first Florida election official to attain national certification in 1996 (Certified Elections Registration Official, the Election Center). He is regularly interviewed by national and local media and has presented testimony before the United States Congress, the United States Election Assistance Committee, and the United States Civil Rights Commission. In 1998, he co-authored the first national Principles and Standards of Conduct of Elections/Registrations Officials. In 2008, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office received the National Freedom Award for outstanding innovations in the field of elections.
John E. Savage, Ph.D. is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT in coding and communication theory and joined Bell Laboratories in 1965 and Brown University in 1967. In 1979 he co-founded the Department of Computer Science at Brown and served as its second chair from 1985 to 1991. His research has centered on theoretical computer science and currently includes cybersecurity, computational nanotechnology, the performance of multicore chips, and reliable computing with unreliable elements. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of AAAS and ACM, and a Life Fellow of IEEE. He served as Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State in 2009-2010.
Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer, BT. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, referred to by The Economist as a “security guru.” He is the author of eight books — including the best sellers Beyond Fear, Secrets and Lies, and Applied Cryptography — as well as hundreds of articles and essays in national and international publications, and many more academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram,” and his blog “Schneier on Security,” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press.
Warren Slocum is a member of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors from the 4th district. Prior to his election to the Board of Supervisors in 2012, Slocum served as the Chief Elections Officer & Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder of San Mateo County. As Chief Elections Officer, he introduced accessible voting equipment with language and adaptive features to ensure that ALL voters could participate in fair, private and secure elections. As Recorder, he oversaw the conversion of recorded paper documents to recorded electronic documents and the creation of a publicly searchable database which made it easy to research property information. He is also one of San Mateo County’s representative on a number of Boards and Commissions including the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Domestic Violence Council, HOPE Interagency Council (Housing Our People Effectively), Redwood City 2020, the Workforce investment Board, and an alternate on the San Francisquito Creek JPA and LAFCO, the independent commission with jurisdiction over the boundaries of the 20 cities, 22 independent special districts and many of the 35 County-governed special districts serving San Mateo County.
Vanessa Teague is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, specializing in end-to-end verifiable cryptographic protocols for electronic elections. Her Ph.D. work with Prof. John Mitchell at Stanford University was on combining ideas from cryptography and game theory in order to understand distributed computations with selfish participants. Since then she has focused on verifiable and private cryptographic protocols for electronic voting, with a particular focus on protocols that work for Australia’s unusual and complicated voting system. She has also written several opinion pieces on electronic voting trials in Australia, all under the auspices of The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE). These have mostly explained that software advertised as secure, private or verifiable was nothing of the kind. She has been invited to testify at various election-related inquiries of Australia’s federal and state parliaments, at which she attempted to explain what did, and did not, constitute verifiable electronic voting. Her current project is helping to design an end-to-end verifiable attendance voting system, based on prêt à voter, for use in state elections in Victoria.
Michael Ubell, Software Architect, Berkeley Database Group, Oracle. Ubell began his career working on the original Ingres project at the University of California.He has served in engineering and management roles at Britton Lee,Digital Equipment Corporation, Illustra and Informix.Heholds a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Hampshire College and a MA in Computer Science from theUniversity of California at Berkeley.
Nancy Wallace is a Maryland Voting Activist affiliated with the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland. Background: Experienced lobbyist and volunteer organizer. Wallace has worked for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), as supervisor of a team of three software testers handling 12 of the 13 national computer systems which support case adjudication by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. She is also in charge of process compliance, or what the Program Manual terms quality control, for the software development and testing.
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Front Page Image Credits: “Indiana Early Voting” AP/Michael Conroy; “Paper Prophets” Aurich Dawson, posted at Ars Tecnica; “Political Ads” Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Corbis; “Binary Code”, stock image; Icons by Nika Korniyenko, ArtNika.com.
Much of the content on this website was excerpted with permission from two sources: Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Voting Technology Preparedness, Verified Voting Foundation, Common Cause, and Rutgers School of Law, 2012; and Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, 2012. We are grateful to all who contributed to this website.





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