Seminar: Lessons Learned in Election Technology from the 2008 Elections, and Future Directions, Jeremy Epstein, Cigital Inc. (12/8/2008)

Abstract

It's just five weeks after the US 2008 election, and the election seems to have gone relatively smoothly.  Or did it?  While we didn't see any hanging chads (like in 2000) or 8-hour lines (like 2004), there were some failures.  Many localities ran into problems with voters being inexplicably dropped off the rolls, or new voters not being added.  Electronic pollbooks seemed to cause more problems than they solved, despite the widely touted ability to handle voters faster and more accurately.  Localities that use optical scan systems generally had short lines, while touch-screen localities not surprisingly had longer lines and more failures.  Do the new-fangled handicapped accessible voting systems actually work for voters with disabilities?  Audits to validate the accuracy of the machines counts are still ongoing - what will we learn from those?  What did we learn from the experiments with overseas voting?  And how will this impact the future - will it reinforce the current move towards optical scan? Will there be a renewed push for Internet voting to keep young voters engaged?

Bio

Jeremy Epstein is a Principal Security Consultant with Cigital, Inc.  Prior to joining Cigital, he ran the security group for Software AG, an international business software company.  Electronic voting is a hobby that threatens to overtake his life.  In recent years he's developed a voting risk model for the US Election Assistance Commission, served on two Virginia legislative panels investigating what the Commonwealth should be doing, co-founded Virginia Verified Voting (a lobbying group for safer electronic voting), been an expert reviewer for the nationally recognized "Brennan Report", consulted to the Attorney General of Kentucky, and was the expert witness for voting technology in a case against the State of Maryland.  He recently published an article in IEEE Computer on how electronic voting machines work.  Jeremy has been involved in security research, development, and analysis for 20 years.  He holds a BS in Computer Science from New Mexico Tech, an MS in Computer Sciences from Purdue University, and an ABD in Information Security from George Mason University.