Math & Cultural

  Internet Voting: Wishful Thinking?

  Barbara Simons, Board Chair, Verified Voting

  September 16,  2015

  6:30-7:45 p.m. 

I can bank online; why can't I vote online?

“Internet voting is the wave of the future and the way to save money while increasing voter participation, especially by young people.”

Such opinions, combined with appeals on behalf of voters with disabilities, have created strong pressure to adopt Internet voting. In the U.S. there is also concern about facilitating voting for members of the military and civilians living abroad. Consequently, Internet voting is currently being deployed in some states and considered by others. Similar patterns exists in other countries, such as Australia and Canada.

The talk will address some of the security threats to Internet voting. If there is time, the speaker will also touch on online voter registration, online ballot marking systems, and computerized voting in general.

Barbara Simons is a former President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the nation’s oldest and largest educational and scientific society for computing professionals. She is the only woman to have received the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. in computer science. A fellow of ACM and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she also received the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award.

An expert on electronic voting, she published Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?, a book on voting machines co-authored with Douglas Jones. She was appointed to the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in 2008 by Sen. Harry Reid, and she co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) in 2004 because of security concerns. She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting, convened by President Clinton, that conducted one of the first studies of Internet Voting and produced a report in 2001. She co-authored the July 2015 report of the U.S. Vote Foundation entitled The Future of Voting: End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting. She is Board Chair of Verified Voting.

Admission is free and open to the public. Seating, however, is limited, and we encourage you to reserve your seat in advance to ensure admission.

Please register using the form below: