When: Monday, April 16, 12:00 p.m.

Where: Distributed Education Center, Looby Level Collaborative Innovation Center

Michael I. Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor
Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon

CyLab Seminar

Abstract:
On Election Day in 2006, Republican Vern Buchanan beat Democrat Christine Jennings in Florida’s 13th District U.S. Congressional race. The winning margin was 369 votes out of a total of 238,249 cast. However, when the results were tallied, 18,412 electronic ballots from Sarasota County, more than 15% of the ballots cast there, were found to contain no vote for either candidate. Either those votes were properly cast, but lost or misrecorded somehow, or were never cast at all. Sarasota used iVotronic direct-recording electronic machines without a voter-verified paper trail, similar but not identical to the ones used in Pittsburgh.

Within 24 hours after the election, Florida’s Secretary of State started an investigation. Jennings filed a lawsuit in Florida to overturn the election, alleging that the machines were flawed, and the U.S. House of Representatives has appointed a subcommittee to look into the matter. Florida formed a task force of security and election experts to determine whether anything in the machines’ source code could have caused such a high undervote.

The speaker was a member of that task force along with seven others, including Alec Yasinsac of Florida State University, Matt Bishop of U.C. Davis and David Wagner of U.C. Berkeley. The talk will detail the methodology used by the task force and its findings.

Michael I. Shamos is Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as Co-Director of the Institute for eCommerce, teaching courses in eCommerce technology, electronic payment systems and eCommerce law and regulation. In 2001 the eCommerce program at Carnegie Mellon was ranked #1 in the U.S. by U.S. News and World Report and #2 in the world by the Wall Street Journal.

Lunch provided.

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