‘Adventures in Electronic Voting Failures’ topic of Election Day Scientia

FROM RICE NEWS STAFF REPORTS

The topic of the next Scientia lecture, set for Nov. 2 — Election Day, is well-timed: “Adventures in Electronic Voting Failures.” Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science, will present the talk at 4 p.m. in Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

	DAN WALLACH

In elections employing electronic voting machines, Wallach said, poor procedures, equipment failures and honest mistakes have been observed to pose a real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. The event logs kept by these machines can give auditors clues as to the causes of anomalies and inconsistencies; however, each voting machine is trusted to keep its own audit and ballot data, making the record unreliable. If a machine is damaged, accidentally erased or otherwise compromised during the election, there is no way to detect tampering or loss of auditing records and cast votes.

Wallach’s talk will begin with experiences in real elections where these issues have been observed in the field, including a disputed primary election in Laredo, Texas, as well as the recent congressional election in Sarasota, Fla. He said, “These issues motivate a new design for a voting architecture we call ‘VoteBox,’ which networks the voting machines in a polling place, allowing for replicated, timeline-entangled logs, which can survive malice and malfunction to provide a verifiable audit of Election Day events.”

Wallach is director of the National Science Foundation-sponsored ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections).

Scientia is an institute of Rice University faculty founded in 1981 by the mathematician and historian of science Salomon Bochner. The lecture series provides an opportunity for scholarly discussion across disciplinary boundaries; its members and fellows come from a wide range of academic disciplines. For more on Scientia, visit http://scientia.rice.edu.