Voting research center opens
By Patrice Hutton   Johns Hopkins University
September 09, 2005

The Johns Hopkins University, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, announced in August the opening of A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), which will blend public policy and computer science in an attempt to create stronger and more accurate voting technology.

ACCURATE, funded by the National Science Foundation and in cooperation with the help of five other research institutions, will be based at Hopkins and seek to assuage mounting concern about the increasing use of electronic voting machines.

In a statement released by Hopkins, Avi Rubin, who will be directing ACCURATE, said, "This center will develop the fundamental science necessary for secure, accessible, trustworthy and transparent voting."

Rubin is a professor of computer science at Hopkins and technical director of the University's Information Security Institute.

The National Science Foundation has pledged to contribute $7.5 million over five years.

Funding will also be provided from the Help America Vote Act of 2002.

The grant from the NSF appropriates $1.2 million for Rubin's research at Hopkins as well as voting technology for ACCURATE.

Researchers from Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Rice University, the SRI International will also be involved.

"Our goals are to do basic computer science research that is needed if computers are to be utilized in the voting process. We want to provide ways to audit software, to verify election results and to make the whole process transparent to average voters," Rubin said.

Researchers will look for methods of safeguarding against common ways that elections are tampered with.

The team will also research electronic voting programming and hardware, focusing on cryptography, which is used to maintain privacy for the voter's ions and ensure that computers count all votes.

Team members focusing their research in the area of public policy will study legal issues that previously have not attracted as much attention, including issues of human behavior in relation to the rapid change from paper to electronic ballot and measuring levels of confidence that people hold towards accuracy of their electronic vote.

The percentage of U.S. voters casting ballots on electronic machines is expected to rise 13percent from 2000 to 2008. "This is because the federal government poured almost $4 billion into electronic voting via the Help America Vote Act," Rubin said.

"Our country moved to electronic voting in public elections before the technology was ready," Rubin said. He noted that the use of mark paper ballots and optical scan readers should have been continued at the precinct level rather than electronic voting machines.

In a press release from Johns Hopkins, Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science at Rice, spoke on behalf of the ACCURATE proposal.

"The basic question is how can we employ computer systems as trustworthy election systems when we know computers are not totally reliable, totally secure or bug-free," said Wallach, who will serve as the associate director of ACCURATE.

"In voting, this is complicated by the fact that potential adversaries include everyone from the voting system designers, elections officials and voters to political operatives, hackers and foreign agents," Wallach said.

Rubin said that once the findings of ACCURATE have been made public, results will be distributed to elections official, vendors and other interested parties.

"We will not produce any products ourselves, but we will provide the technological groundwork that others can use to provide equipment," Rubin said.

"There is no reason why computers cannot be used to improve election systems, but it has to be done right," Rubin told Hopkins.

"Our research will focus on leveraging the best properties of different technologies to design the strongest overall system. ACCURATE has a unique opportunity to produce ground-breaking scientific research while at the same time helping to protect our democracy," Rubin said.