PITTSBURGH, Aug. 23 (AScribe Newswire) -- As the 2004 presidential election draws near, voters and experts alike hope to avoid a repeat of the vote-counting controversy that surrounded the 2000 presidential election. Experts at Carnegie Mellon University propose electronic voting as a reliable option and seek to address the problems that have arisen with electronic voting. For more information, contact Jonathan Potts, 412-268-6094, or Gretchen Underwood, 412-268-2900.
$10,000 Says Electronic Voting Is the Way to Go
Michael Shamos, distinguished career professor, Language Technologies Institute; director, Universal Library; and co-director of the Electronic Commerce degree program, spent 20 years as an official certifier of electronic voting equipment in Pennsylvania and Texas. He recently has testified to three Congressional committees on electronic voting security, and as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Privacy Technology he is examining the privacy issues raised by electronic voting. Shamos stands by the reliability and security of Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines and for the past six years has offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who can tamper undetected with a DRE machine. He says that in 25 years there have been no verified incidents of tampering with the machines, while there have been numerous cases in which paper ballots have been manipulated to alter the outcome of elections. http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos
Internet Voting: Secure and Private?
Lorrie Cranor, associate research professor in the Institute for Software Research International, organized the session on electronic voting at the 2004 Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference and served on the executive committee of the National Workshop on Internet Voting, which produced a report to President Clinton in 2001. In the late 1990s she developed Sensus, a program designed for conducting secure and private elections and surveys over the Internet, and continues to develop Declared-Strategy Voting, a system that allows voters to vote both expressively and effectively. http://lorrie.cranor.org/voting/
Paper Trails Don't Mean You Can Verify It
A paper trail of votes does not necessarily guarantee
that the final tally in an election can be accurately
verified by an independent party, according to Alessandro
Acquisti, assistant professor of information technology and
public policy at the H. John Heinz III School of Public
Policy and Management. Because physical documents can be
lost, manipulated or destroyed, by themselves they do not
ensure verifiability, Acquisti says. His research focuses on
cryptographic protocols that ensure anonymity and provable
verifiability. The implementation of these protocols can
result in elections in which the final tally of votes can be
verified by any party to be the exact and correct
representation of the actual votes cast by eligible
voters. In addition to these properties, such protocols are
practical because they may be implemented as purely
electronic systems as well as hybrid electronic and paper
systems. http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/research.htm
|
|
|
AScribe Newswire distributes news from nonprofit and public sector organizations. We provide direct, immediate access to mainstream national media for 600 colleges, universities, medical centers, public-policy groups and other leading nonprofit organizations.
AScribe transmits news releases directly to newsroom computer systems and desktops of major media organizations via a supremely trusted channel - The Associated Press. We also feed news to major news retrieval database services, online publications and to developers of web sites and Intranets.
And AScribe does it at a cost all organizations, large and small, can afford, a fraction of what corporate newswires charge. Click here to see how we do it