Speaker Name/Affiliation: David Jefferson/Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory

Date/Time: Monday April 7 2008 6:

30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host Name: Elaine Rich and Alan
Cline

Talk Title: Electronic Voting: Reliability Security and Othe

r Issues

Talk Abstract:
On the surface computerized elections wo

uld seem to be very
simple. What is so hard about using computers to ga

ther votes
add them up and declare the winners? The answer is that on

ly
1 percent of the logic of elections is needed to accurately gather <

br>and count votes. The other 99 percent is devoted to security
reliab

ility vote secrecy accessibility transparency auditability
electio

n management and dealing with the complexity of election
laws in 50 sta

tes.

Security in particular is of enormous concern since software

controlled voting systems allow for serious sometimes undetectable
bugs in the voting software and also for the possibility of malicious
software attacks that can compromise the integrity of elections
undete

ctably. We will discuss several examples of serious bugs
that have aris

en in voting systems. We will then explain why
computer scientists all

over the country are so seriously worried
about the potential problem o

f insider election fraud with paperless
electronic voting and why some

what ironically the computer science
community has been leading the mov

ement back to paper ballots.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. David Jefferson is

a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory where h

e 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.