Yesterday was the USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop held in Boston. Today I will give some overall impressions and highlight just one of the relevant papers.
UPDATE: Avi Rubin blogs on session with Debra Bowen
(inappropriate certification processes for electonic voting)
For me it was a highly educational and engaging day. My experience at conferences with highly academic papers, was in the mid 1980’s when for several years I participated in annual Artificial Intelligence conferences. At those conferences I found the general sessions very useful but the academic papers were very detailed, seemingly crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on previous papers, those sessions went well beyond my tolerance for detail. The papers presented at the workshop yesterday were all clear and interesting, timely, and most were relevant to voting in Connecticut.
Seeing and meeting the other attendees was also a highlight of the day – researchers whose papers and blogs I’ve read, talked to previously, and who have made huge contributions to raise awareness of the risks of electronic voting. It was also hopeful to see a considerable group of researchers who work with state election officials and three election officials. Alex Shvartsman of Uconn and several of his students were there presenting one of their recent papers. Clearly the most appreciated attendee was Debra Bowen, Secretary of the State of California.
Sixteen of forty-two submitted papers were presented. A huge increase from the eighteen papers submitted last year. Doug Jones from Iowa, who testified to the CT Legislature a year lor two ago, was one of the organizers. He expressed the hope that next year more papers would be available that point the way to improved, reliable voting methods. Most of the papers this year demonstrated the lack of security and reliability in existing e-voting equipment. Several pointed the way for more effective post election paper audits. The final three papers presented five innovative ways that might enhance the voter attractive touch screen voting to make it private and auditable — unfortunately, for the most part, they accomplished the security by requiring a lot of sophistication on the part of the average voter.
I have covered the Uconn paper previously I will cover a paper relevant to Connecticut, from Princeton, here and perhaps more papers on other days.
The Princeton University paper:
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