Electronic Voting in Massachusetts: problems and prospects

Ben Adida, Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, VSPR (Voting System Performance Rating)	Mr. Ben Adida is a PhD candidate at MIT studying cryptography as applied to voting. His work on voting systems began in 1998, when he co-authored EVOX, a large-scale online voting system prototype. He has in-depth industry experience in software engineering, particularly the open-source development methodology, and is a participant in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards organization. Mr. Adida is currently a member of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project, with a research focus on universally-verifiable voting, paricularly optimal mixnets. He is a founding member of VSPR (Voting System Performance Rating), a new effort devoted to the definition of performance-based standards for the evaluation of voting systems.
David Aragon, VoterMarch.org, VPSR.org, IEEE P1583 committee member	David Aragon serves on the IEEE voting technology standards committee (P1583), where he co-chairs the special task group on voter-verified ballots, and is also a founding member of the Voting Systems Performance Rating (VSPR.org) standards group. An engineer and IEEE member with several publications and patents in data pattern analysis and user interfaces, Mr. Aragon has helped develop image-based systems for high volume financial document processing, and has led R&D groups at TRW and Ask Jeeves. He now specializes in firmware for wireless networking equipment. Mr. Aragon is a volunteer with Voter March, the first national voting rights organization to adopt a pro-audit-trail position.
Dr. Arlene Ash, Research Professor, Boston University School of Medicine, School of Public Health	Dr. Arlene Ash holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics and is currently a Research Professor at both Boston University's Schools of Medicine (Division of General Internal Medicine) and Public Health (Department of Biostatistics). In December 2000 she testified in the absentee ballot fraud case in Martin County, Florida. Dr Ash spoke at the 2004 Suffolk University conference.
Lillie Coney, Associate Director with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Washington DC; member, P1583 committee	Ms. Coney is Associate Director with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). Her issue areas include, but are not limited to; nanotechnology, surveillance, civil rights and privacy, census, voter privacy and electronic voting. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is a public interest research center in Washington, D.C. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values. Today EPIC is one of the most widely cited Internet policy organizations in the world. The web address is http://www.epic.org . Ms. Coney also serves as Coordinator of the recently established National Committee on Voting Integrity (NCVI). NCVI was created in 2003 in response to growing concerns about the reliability of electronic voting systems. Full Bio http://www.epic.org/epic/staff/coney/
Dr. Charles A. Gaston, Assistant Professor of Engineering, Penn State University. IEEE P1583 committee	Dr. Charles A. Gaston is an inventor and engineering generalist, and a Registered Professional Engineer. All his degrees are in Engineering Science, so he has had broad exposure to a wide variety of engineering and science topics. During his 28 years with IBM he worked on projects ranging literally from seismology to cosmology, with such areas as meteorology and respiratory physiology in between. He has done work that could be considered mechanical, electrical, thermal, optical, nuclear, aerospace, computer and industrial engineering. He has been programming computers since 1963, and has been developing user interfaces since 1982. Since 1993 he has been on the Penn State engineering faculty at the York campus.
David Harris, Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law	David H. Harris, Jr., a 22-year veteran attorney, is Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law of the Boston Bar Association, www.lawyerscom.org, a nonprofit legal organization founded by and is supported by the lawyers and law schools in the Commonwealth to fight for the civil, social and economic rights of Commonwealth residents. The Lawyers’ Committee has been handling voting rights cases (redistricting, voter intimidation, voter ID requirements) for 20 years. David Harris has been handling voting rights cases for 20 years in North Carolina, Washington, DC, and Massachusetts. He formerly served as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Associate General Counsel for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Executive Director of the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina.
Merle S. King, Vice-chair, IEEE P1583 Project committee	Merle S. King Associate Professor of Information Systems Chair, Computer Science & Information Systems Executive Director, Center for Election Systems Chair, Information Technology Advisory Committee Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA
Dr Rebecca Mercuri, Research Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; member, P1583 committee	Rebecca T. Mercuri has been researching electronic voting issues since 1989 and has observed elections as a scientist, poll-worker, and committeewoman in various U.S. States. She defended her Ph.D. dissertation "Electronic Vote Tabulation: Checks & Balances" at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science a few weeks prior to the controversial Presidential election of 2000, and subsequently found herself defending the Democratic Recount Committee in testimony presented to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and referenced in briefs presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then, Dr. Mercuri has provided formal testimony on voting systems to the House Science Committee, Federal Election Commission and the U.K. Cabinet, has been quoted in the U.S. Congressional Record, and has played a direct role in municipal, state, federal, and international legislative initiatives. Rebecca divides her time between Notable Software, Inc., the Princeton-area computer consulting firm that she founded in 1984, and a research fellowship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. She serves on the advisory boards of the Princeton professional chapters of the Association for Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society, and is a member of the IEEE's working group on voting system standards.
Ronald L. Rivest, MIT; Chair, NIST/EAC TGDC Subcommittee on Computer Security and Transparency	Professor Rivest is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT 's Department 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 also a founder of RSA Data Security. (RSA was bought by Security Dynamics; the combined company has been renamed to RSA Security .) Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, and algorithms. Professor Rivest 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. Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he has been awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He has also received, together with Shamir and Adleman, the 2002 ACM Turing Award. Professor Rivest has received an honorary degree (the "laurea honoris causa") 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. Professor Rivest is an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and has published numerous papers in these areas. He has 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.
Ted Selker, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Director, Context-Aware Computing Lab, MIT; Co-director, Caltech/MIT voting project; member, P1583 committee	Professor Ted Selker is co-director of the Caltech/MIT voting project and runs the Context-Aware Computing Lab (www.media.mit.edu/context) at the MIT Media and Arts Technology Laboratory. The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project was created to develop research plans for understanding the technical problems and alternatives available for voting. The project hosts classes, talks and creates a forum for voting technology development and assessment. Ted participates in observing elections and analyzing voting equipment. His talks and papers have been influential in creating legislation regarding voting issues. He serves on the IEEE voting technology standards committee (P1583). Ted’s work on voting centers around inventing and testing new technology to improve voting. Examples include new approaches to user ballot interface, registration database testers, ballot design systems, secure on line architectures, and new approaches for using simulation to evaluate political platforms. Ted’s Context Aware Computing Lab (http://context.media.mit.edu) strives to create a world in which peoples’ desires and intentions guide computers to satisfy them. This work creates environments that use sensors and artificial intelligence to create so-called “virtual sensors”; adaptive models of users to create keyboard-less computer scenarios. He is the author of numerous patents and papers.
	Teresa Hommel - Citizen Activist Creator of http://www.wheresthepaper.org Chair, Task Force on Election Integrity, Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist A corporate trainer in computer technology and a consultant for more than 20 years, Teresa Hommel has been speaking to groups in New York and other states about the problems with electronic voting systems and the threat they pose to the integrity of our elections and the legitimacy of our representative government. Ms. Hommel's voting machine simulation program, called the "Fraudulent Voting Machine" has been used internationally to help people understand the risks associated with computers used in elections.
	Richard C. Johnson, Ph.D. CEO IWWCO Dick Johnson is currently head of a small engineering and consulting firm, IWWCO, following work at Oracle Corporation on applications security and voting architectures. He did research and teaching in several universities before turning to software development and systems engineering.