New Standards for
Elections:
A forum on technical and nontechnical requirements for voting systems
Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study, Harvard University
Cronkhite Living Room, Cronkhite Graduate Center
6 Ash Street, Cambridge MA
DATE: Saturday, February 12, 2005 TIME: 1PM - 5PM
FINAL PROGRAM
Welcome: Carol Rose for ACLU of Massachusetts,
Rebecca Mercuri for Radcliffe Institute, Ted Kochanski for IEEE Boston, Peter
Mager for Greater Boston ACM.
Voting equipment standards
are an important new development in the US:
(1:00-2:00) New standards for voting equipment are required by
the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) (2002) which requires nationwide standards
for deployment of improved voting equipment by January 1, 2006. Over the past three years, the IEEE Standards Association Voting Systems Standards (SCC38)
Project on Voting Equipment (P1583) developed a detailed functional description
for precinct-based balloting and ballot counting equipment. This document,
IEEE-STD P1583 "Draft Standard for Evaluation of Voting Equipment",
is (at time of writing) approaching its second attempt at approval within the
IEEE Standards Association process. Its first circulation resulted in over 1000
comments that have considerably improved the document, but numerous areas of
contention and disagreement still exist. The Technical Guidelines Development
Committee (TGDC) of the NIST Election Assistance Commission (EAC) was expected
to adopt these IEEE standards for voting equipment as final Voting System
Standards.
- Merle King, Vice-chair,
IEEE
Voting Equipment Standards
Project 1583; Chair, Dept of Computer Science & Information Systems and Exec.Director, Center for Election Systems, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw GA
-- P1583 origins and directions.
- Rebecca Mercuri, Notable Software (Philadelphia PA), Fellow,
Harvard Radcliffe Institute; active member, IEEE-STD P1583 committee - P1583
status, issues
- Stan Klein, Stan Klein Associates (Rockville MD); active
member, IEEE-STD P1583 committee - Voting system reliability
- David Aragon, VoterMarch.org; active member, IEEE-STD
P1583 committee - What standards can and can't do, and what people might
be hoping that this one will do.
- Ronald Rivest, Viterbi Professor of Computer Science and
Engineering, MIT; Chair, NIST/EAC TGDC Subcommittee on Computer Security
and Transparency -- TGDC status and direction, election security and transparency
requirements of HAVA
- Ben Adida: co-author of EVOX, a large-scale online voting system prototype; PhD student, MIT Lab for Computer Science, member of the Caltech-MIT Voting Technology Project , with a research focus on universally-verifiable voting -- Voting System Performance Rating (vpsr.org) (cofounder)
BREAK
(2:00-3:00) New election technologies, esp.
cryptographic election protocols, may provide provably clean elections, but
are new, complex, and not fully tested in practice, and raise new questions of
election transparency, while also raising the possibility of a new standard of
technical confidence in election practice.
- Ron Rivest, Ben Adida – Cryptographic election protocols tutorial
- Dick Johnson, consultant, active member, IEEE-STD P1583
committee - Stem to Stern Security for the Networked Voting Process
- Chuck Gaston, SAVIOC Voting Systems, active member, IEEE-STD
P1583 committee -- How standards can block improvements
BREAK
(3:00-4:00) New expectations for the
democratic process are growing in the US, and demand is rising for true
national standards for election operations.
- Ted Selker, MIT Media Laboratory, Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project - Election operations errors in practice
- Teresa Hommel, wheresthepaper.org, Chair, Task Force on Election Integrity, Community Church of New York Unitarian Universalist --
Oversight of Elections or Techology
- Lillie Coney, Coordinator, National Committee for Voting
Integrity, Electronic Privacy Information Center -
Voter Privacy, the Secret Ballot, and Centralized Voter Registration Databases
- Arlene Ash, Research Professor, Boston University Schools of Medicine (Division of General Internal Medicine) and Public Health (Department of Biostatistics) - Statistical checks on electoral integrity, "spoilage" and election technology
- David H. Harris, Jr, Executive Director of the Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights under Law - Towards national standards for
elections
BREAK
(4:00-5:00) DISCUSSION moderated by Carol Rose, Executive Director, ACLU of Massachusetts