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Expert on electronic voting issues to speak at UO
Computer scientist Barbara Simons, national expert on technical glitches in electronic voting, to be part of Distinguished Lecture Series of the department of computer and information science on March 13
EUGENE, Ore. -- (March 3, 2008) -- Will electronic voting make U.S. elections more accurate and fair? A guest speaker at the University of Oregon may make Oregon voters embrace their by-mail ballots a little longer -- especially in a year when the state's primary may be important.
Barbara Simons, a computer scientist who served on a national panel that reviewed electronic voting and another that scrutinized security concerns, will speak about progress and technical problems involving electronic voting methods at 7 p.m. Thursday (March 13) in Room 110 of the William W. Knight Law Center, 1515 Agate St. Admission is free and open to the public.
Her talk is part of the Distinguished Lecture Series of the department of computer and information science. She will discuss Florida's controversial 2000 election and the subsequent push for computerized voting. A review of California's effort found problems in reliability, security and ease of use for people with disabilities.
Simons served on the National Workshop on Internet Voting convened in 2001 and on the Security Peer Review Group for the Department of Defense Internet (SERVE) voting project. She co-authored a report that led to SERVE's cancellation because of security concerns. She co-chaired the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) study of statewide databases of registered voters. Simons, former president of ACM, drafted the position by the League of Women Voters that supports "voting systems and procedures that are secure, accurate, re-countable and accessible."
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is a world-class teaching and research institution and Oregon's flagship public university. The UO is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization made up of 62 of the leading public and private research institutions in the United States and Canada. Membership in the AAU is by invitation only. The University of Oregon is one of only two AAU members in the Pacific Northwest.
Media Contact: Jim Barlow, 541-346-3481, jebarlow@uoregon.edu
Source: Jun Li, assistant professor of computer and information science and director of the Network Security Research Laboratory, 541-346-4424, lijun@cs.uoregon.edu
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