“The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems”

Prof. David L. Dill,
Stanford University Department of Computer Science and Founder of VerifiedVoting.org
Date: Wednesday, 18 February, 2004
Time: 6:30pm Refreshments; 7:00pm
Location: Hewlett Packard (see directions)
Free and open to all who wish to attend, but membership is only $10/year.

Touch-screen voting machines store records of cast votes in internal memory, where the voter cannot check them. Because of our system of secret ballots, once the voter leaves the polls there is no way anyone can determine whether the vote captured was what the voter intended. Why should voters trust these machines?

In December 2002, Professor Dill drafted a "Resolution on Electronic Voting" stating that every voting system should have a "voter verifiable audit trail," which is a permanent record of the vote that can be checked for accuracy by the voter, and which is saved for a recount if it is required. By doing so, he became embroiled in a surprisingly fierce battle that continues today.

We still don't have an answer for why we should trust electronic voting machines, but a lot of evidence has emerged for why we should NOT. In this talk, Professor Dill will discuss the basic principles and issues in electronic voting.

David L. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. His primary research interests relate to the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems.

In the last year, Prof. Dill entered the debate on electronic voting with the "Resolution on Electronic Voting", which has been endorsed by many computer technologist as well as political scientists, lawyers, and other individuals. He served on the California Secretary of State's Ad Hoc Committee on Touch Screen Voting, he is on the IEEE P1583 voting standards committee, and is a member of the DRE Citizen's Oversight Committee for Santa Clara County, California. He is the founder of VerifiedVoting.org, whose mission is to champion transparent, reliable, and publicly verifiable elections in the United States.