The Verified Voting Board of Directors is responsible for strategic planning and oversight of the organization. Many directors are notable figures in computer science, business, the media, and civic affairs. Verified Voting is currently seeking additional board members who have expertise in fundraising and bring diverse perspective and backgrounds to the organization.

Barbara Simons, Ph.D., Board Chair

An expert on electronic voting, Barbara Simons is on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting that was convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001. She participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns. Simons also co-chaired the ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) study of statewide databases of registered voters. Simons and Douglas W. Jones co-authored the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?“

Simons was President of ACM, the nation’s oldest and largest educational and scientific society for computing professionals, from July 1998 until June 2000. She founded ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many years as the Chair or co-Chair of USACM. In 2005 Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley. She is also a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the Distinguished Service Award from Computing Research Association, the Making a Difference Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computing and Society (SIGCAS), the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). She was selected by C|NET as one of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100 Women in Computing.” Science Magazine featured her in a special edition on women in science.

Simons served on the President’s Export Council’s Subcommittee on Encryption and on the Information Technology-Sector of the President’s Council on the Year 2000 Conversion. She is on the Board of Directors of VerifiedVoting.org and of Public Knowledge. In 2006 she stepped down from the boards of the U. C. Berkeley Engineering Fund, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Oxford Internet Institute, as well as the Advisory Council of the Public Interest Registry’s ORG. She has testified before both the U.S. and the California legislatures and at government sponsored hearings. She was runner-up in the first election for the North America seat on the ICANN Board. Simons co-founded the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities in the Computer Science Department at U.C. Berkeley. She is also on the Boards of the Coalition to Diversify Computing (CDC) and the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT), groups that work at increasing participation in computer science of underrepresented minorities.

Simons earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation solved a major open problem in scheduling theory. In 1980, she became a Research Staff Member at IBM’s San Jose Research Center (now Almaden). In 1992, she joined IBM’s Applications Development Technology Institute as a Senior Programmer and subsequently served as Senior Technology Advisor for IBM Global Services. Her main areas of research have been compiler optimization, algorithm analysis and design, and scheduling theory. Her work on clock synchronization won an IBM Research Division Award. She holds several patents and has authored or co-authored a book and numerous technical papers. She is retired from IBM Research.

Cindy Cohn

As the legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Cindy Cohn is responsible for overseeing the EFF’s overall legal strategy. She first became involved with EFF as the lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, which successfully challenged U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. In 1997, she was named one of California Lawyer magazine’s “lawyers of the year.” Cohn is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and did her undergraduate work at the University of Iowa and the London School of Economics. For ten years prior to joining EFF, she was a civil litigator in private practice handling Internet-related cases, including domain name disputes, suits arising from unsolicited commercial e-mail (“spam”), and challenges to government efforts to gather information from Internet Service Providers about their customers.

David L. Dill, Ph.D.

David L. Dill, Ph.D., provides visibility, credentials, and academic expertise on the subject of voting machines and computer science. He is the organization’s founder. Dill is a Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1987. He has an S.B. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1979), and an M.S and Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1982 and 1987). His primary research interests relate to the theory and application of formal verification techniques to system designs, including hardware, protocols, and software. He has also done research in asynchronous circuit verification and synthesis, and in verification methods for hard real-time systems. He was the Chair of the Computer-Aided Verification Conference held at Stanford University in 1994. From July 1995 to September 1996, he was the Chief Scientist at 0-In Design Automation.

Prof. Dill’s Ph.D. thesis, “Trace Theory for Automatic Hierarchical Verification of Speed Independent Circuits” was named as a Distinguished Dissertation by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and published as such by M.I.T. Press in 1988. He was the recipient of an Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation in 1988, and a Young Investigator award from the Office of Naval Research in 1991. He has received Best Paper awards at International Conference on Computer Design in 1991 and the Design Automation Conference in 1993 and 1998. He was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2001 for his contributions to verification of circuits and systems.

Since becoming involved in the electronic voting controversy, Prof. Dill has served on the California Secretary of State’s Ad Hoc Task Force on Touch-Screen Voting and currently serves on the IEEE P1583 Committee and Santa Clara County’s Citizen’s DRE Oversight Board. In December of 2003, Prof. Dill was one of a select group of presenters at the Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In April 2005, he testified before the Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, and in July 2005, before the Rules Committee of the U.S. Senate. 

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Ph.D.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall is the Senior Staff Technologist at at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, DC-based non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the internet remains free, open and innovative.  Prior to joining CDT in late 2012, Hall was a postdoctoral research fellow with Helen Nissenbaum at New York University, Ed Felten at Princeton University and Deirdre Mulligan at University of California, Berkeley.

Hall’s current work focuses on policy mechanisms that promote trustworthiness and transparency in information systems, as core functions of society and government become networked and computerized. Hall’s work at CDT is split between Consumer Privacy, Health Privacy and National Security.  Hall received his Ph.D. in information systems from the UC Berkeley School of Information in 2008. His Ph.D. thesis used electronic voting as a critical case study in digital government transparency. In his postdoctoral work, he developed techniques to increase the efficiency and usability of accountability mechanisms in electronic elections. Hall holds master’s degrees in astrophysics and information systems from UC Berkeley and was a founding member of the National Science Foundation’s ACCURATE Center (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). He has served as an expert on independent teams invited by the States of California, Ohio and Maryland to analyze legal, privacy, security, usability and economic aspects of voting systems. In 2012, Hall received the John Gideon Memorial Award from the Election Verification Network for contributions to election verification.

Dr. David Jefferson, Ph. D., Board Vice-Chair

Dr. David Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he works on supercomputing applications. But he has also been active in research at the intersection of the computing and public elections for well over a decade. In 1994, while at Digital Equipment Corporation, he oversaw development of the California Election Server, the first web server anywhere to provide online voter information on candidates and issues. It set what was then a world traffic record of 1 million hits in a 24 hour period. In 1995 he helped develop, in cooperation with the California Voter Foundation, the first online database of campaign finance information ever, for the San Francisco municipal election of that year. They repeated it at the state level in 1998 for the California general election. These efforts played a large role in convincing California, and eventually most other states, to pass laws requiring campaign finance disclosure information to be filed electronically, instead of on paper, and published on the Internet before the election.

In 1999 he served as chair of the technical committee of the Secretary of State Bill Jones’ task force on Internet voting, whose report was the first major study of the subject ever published. He subsequently served on the National Science Foundation-Internet Policy Institute panel on Internet voting, and testified to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform organized by presidents Carter and Ford. He has also consulted with numerous agencies and states on the subject of voting security, including the FEC and the Department of Defense. He is also coauthor of the SERVE Security Report (servesecurityreport.org), which detailed the security vulnerabilities in the Defense Department’s proposed Internet voting system in 2004 and led to the cancellation of the program.

In 2003 he was a member of the California Secretary of State’s task force on Touchscreen Voting, whose recommendations led eventually to voter verified audit trails for electronic voting machines in California. Since then he has served as the chair of the Secretary of State’s Technical Advisory Board (TAB) under Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, and then as chair of its successor, the Voting Systems Technology Assessment and Advisory Board (VSTAAB) under Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. Under Secretary of State Debra Bowen he served as chair of the Post-election Audit Standards Working Group that worked in parallel with the Top to Bottom Review of California voting systems. He has been a member and past Chair of the board of directors of the California Voter Foundation for 12 years. From 1980 to 1994 Dr. Jefferson was a computer science professor, first at USC and then at UCLA, where he conducted research in parallel computation and simulation. He is well known for the co-invention of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation and has also published research in operating systems, evolution, and artificial life.

Ron Rivest, Ph.D.

Ron Rivest, Ph.D. is the Viterbi Professor of Computer Science in MIT’s Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab’s Theory of Computation Group and is a leader of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is a founder of RSA Data Security and an inventor of the RSA public-key cryptosystem, and a co-founder of Verisign and of Peppercoin. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, voting systems, and algorithms. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the International Association for Cryptographic Research, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also on the EPIC Advisory Board.

Together with Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, he was awarded the 2000 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award and the Secure Computing Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received, together with Shamir and Adleman, the 2002 ACM Turing Award and the 2009 NEC C&C Prize. He received an honorary degree from the University of Rome. He is a Fellow of the World Technology Network and a Finalist for the 2002 World Technology Award for Communications Technology. In 2005, he received the MITX Lifetime Achievement Award; in 2007, he received both the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference “Distinguished Innovator” award and the Marconi Prize. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate from the Louvain School of Engineering at the Universite Catholique de Louvain (UCL). In 2010, he was awarded MIT’s Kilian Faculty Achievement Award. He has extensive experience in cryptographic design and cryptanalysis, and served as a Director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, the organizing body for the Eurocrypt and Crypto conferences, and as a Director of the Financial Cryptography Association. 

Kevin Shelley

Kevin Shelley is a former California Secretary of State and State Assembly leader recognized as an advocate for working people, consumers and investors. Mr. Shelley’s political involvement began in 1978 as a staff member to U.S. Representatives Phil and Sala Burton. He then played a key role in electing their successor, current Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, in 1987. His own political career began in 1990, when he won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

Elected to the California State Assembly in 1996, he championed the rights of workers and fought to protect civil rights. Among his accomplishments, he improved conditions at nursing homes, drafted new corporate accountability requirements and created a restitution fund for victims of corporate fraud.

Mr. Shelley, who spent five of his six years in the State Assembly as Majority Leader, won election for Secretary of State in November 2002. As the state’s Chief Election Officer, he is credited with improving voter participation, calmly overseeing the historic recall election, and decertifying problematic electronic voting machines. He established the first in the nation standards for accessible voter-verified paper audit trails to be used with direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines in California.

Since 2005, Mr. Shelley has been representing consumers and plaintiffs in civil litigation. He began working with Berman DeValerio in 2006. He is the son of Jack Shelley, a former San Francisco mayor, U.S. congressman and California state senator.

Pamela Smith

Pamela Smith is President of Verified Voting, a non-partisan nonprofit working to safeguard elections in the digital age. She provides information and public testimony on verified voting issues at federal and state levels throughout the US, including to the US House of Representatives Committee on House Administration. She oversees an extensive information resource on election equipment and the regulations governing its use at the federal level and across the 50 states. Ms. Smith is co-editor of the Principles and Best Practices in Post Election Audits, co-author of “Counting Votes 2012: A State By State Look at Election Preparedness” and the author of an introductory chapter on audits for Confirming Elections: Creating Confidence and Integrity through Election Auditing. She has been a small business and marketing consultant and nonprofit executive for a Hispanic educational organization working on first language literacy and adult learning.

Philip B. Stark, Ph.D.

Philip B. Stark is Professor and chair of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He served on California Secretary of State Bowen’s Post Election Audit Standards Working Group. He developed the notion of “risk-limiting audits.” He is working with the Secretaries of State of California and Colorado to develop and test standard procedures for risk-limiting audits. Dr. Stark has published more than one hundred articles and books, served on the editorial board of several scientific journals, and lectured at universities and professional societies in seventeen countries. He has consulted for the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the California Attorney General, the California Highway Patrol, and the Illinois State Attorney. He has testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Census; the State of California Senate Committee on Elections, Reapportionment and Constitutional Amendments; the State of California Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting; and the State of California Senate Committee on Natural Resources. In 2011, Dr. Stark received the University of California Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for Research in the Public Interest.

Verified Voting’s goals and strategies have been developed in consultation with many others who are on our Board of Advisors.  All members of our Board of Directors are also on the advisory board.

Lillie Coney is Associate Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization in Washington, DC. EPIC was established to focus public attention on civil liberties issues. Ms. Coney joined EPIC in 2004 to head up the organization’s voting and privacy project. In 2005, she was named Associate Director. In 2006, Ms. Coney was the organizing force behind the first research conducted in a polling location to measure the usability of optical-scan and touch screen voting systems resulted in the report, Voting Technology, Election Administration, and Voter Performance, published by Stein, Vonnahme, Byrne, and Wallach (2008). In October 2008, EPIC’s voting project published E-Deceptive Campaign Practices Report: Internet Technology and Democracy 2.0, the first report to review technology as a tool for online deceptive campaign practices. The report reviewed the potential for abuse of Internet technology in an election context, and made recommendations for steps that could be taken by Election Protection, Election Administrators, and voters to protect the integrity of the upcoming election. In 2009, she coordinated and lead the audit review of the Punchscan Voting Systems use in the November 2009, Takoma Park Municipal election. She has written and spoken extensively on the subject of voting technology and privacy. She has published several law and policy journal articles on elections and voting systems. Ms. Coney serves in an advisory capacity to ACCURATE, Voting System Performance Rating, and Open Voting Consortium. She is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Public Policy Committee. 

Larry Diamond

Jeremy Epstein, is a Senior Computer Scientist with SRI International in Arlington VA. He’s been a researcher in voting system security for nearly a decade, and one of the authors of the EAC’s risk assessment model research program. He’s been a consultant to the Kentucky Attorney General, an appointed member of two Virginia legislative committees, an advisor to the DC City Council, and an advisor to the Federal Voting Assistance Program, all on issues relating to voting system security. He has been nominated as the IEEE representative on the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, which advises the Election Assistance Commission on voting system security standards. Jeremy is experienced in how commercial technology is built, having spent nine years as an executive responsible for product security at a mid-size software vendor. Jeremy holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Michael J. Fischer, Ph.D. has been Professor of Computer Science at Yale University since 1981. He has an M.A. (1965) and a Ph.D. (1968) from Harvard University. Professor Fischer supervised Josh Benaloh‘s dissertation, “Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections” (1987), which was the first distributed voting protocol to simultaneously achieve voter privacy and voter verifiability. Professor Fischer is a founding member of TrueVoteCT.org, a public-service organization that helped to bring verifiable optical scan voting technology to Connecticut. He was appointed by Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell in 2005 to the short-lived Voting Technology Standards Board, where he was elected Vice-chair by its members. His research interests include theory of distributed and parallel computing, cryptography, and computer security.

J. Alex Halderman, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. His research spans applied computer security and tech-centric public policy, including topics such as software security, data privacy, electronic voting, censorship resistance, digital rights management, and cybercrime, as well as technological aspects of intellectual property law and government regulation. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University.

Harri Hursti, Chief Technology Officer of SafelyLocked LLC, is one of the world’s leading experts on voting systems and is known for his demonstration of the vulnerability of America’s voting systems in the HBO documentary, “Hacking Democracy”. He has been one of the lead technical resources in the major independent technical reviews of America’s voting systems: Ohio’s Sec. of State-ordered EVEREST Study and the New Jersey’s Superior Court judge-ordered review of the Sequoia voting machines. Harri is the 2009 recipient of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for his role in demonstrating the vulnerability of America’s electronic voting machines. 

Candice Hoke, founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University, Associate Professor of Law (Election, Regulatory, and Employment Law). Background: a research Team Leader for CA Secretary of State’s landmark scientific study of voting systems (2007); member, American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Election Law Advisory Commission (2007- ); proposed and led the first post-election audit in Ohio (Cuyahoga, November 2006), testified to Congress on the critical need for independent election auditing to rebuild public trust in the election system. 

Roger G. Johnston, Ph.D., CPP, is Leader of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory.  He was founder and head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1992 to 2007.Johnston has provided consulting, training, vulnerability assessments, R&D, and security solutions for more than 50 government and international agencies, private companies, and NGOs.  Roger graduated from Carleton College (1977), and received M.S. & Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Colorado (1983).  He has authored over 165 technical papers and 90 invited talks (including 6 Keynote Addresses), holds 10 U.S. patents, and serves as Editor of the Journal of Physical Security.

Douglas W. Jones, Ph.D. is a computer scientist at the University of Iowa. His research focuses primarily on computer security, particularly electronic voting. Together with Barbara Simons, Jones has published a book on electronic voting entitled Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?. Jones’s most widely cited work centers on the evaluation of priority queue implementations. This work has been credited with helping relaunch the empirical study of algorithm performance.^[3] In related work, Jones applied splay trees to data compression and developed algorithms for applying parallel computing to discrete event simulation. Jones’s PhD thesis was in the area of capability-based addressing, and he has occasionally published on other aspects of computer architecture. ^]He has published work on computer architecture on an occasional basis, such as his proposal for a one instruction set computer. Jones’ involvement with electronic voting research began in 1994, when he was appointed to the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems. He chaired the board from 1999 to 2003, and has testified before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the United States House Committee on Science and the Federal Election Commission on voting issues. In 2005 he participated as an election observer for the presidential election in Kazakhstan. Jones was the technical advisor for HBO’s documentary on electronic voting machine issues, “Hacking Democracy“, that was released in 2006. He was a member of the ACCURATE electronic voting project from 2005 to 2011. On Dec. 11, 2009, the Election Assistance Commission appointed Douglas Jones to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee. Jones received a B.S. in physics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1973, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1976 and 1980 respectively. 

Lou Katz, Ph.D. has a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Wisconsin, was a molecular biologist at MIT and the Director of the Computer Graphics Facility in the Department of Biology, Columbia University and Director of the Core Computer Facility at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and Director of Computing Resources in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. As one of the founders of the Usenix Association, he served as its first President and also as a director, and he also served as a member of the Executive Committee of ACM/Siggraph. He is experienced in computer systems and network management, database and email systems, and in evaluating the security aspects of software prior to deployment on internet-facing servers.

Douglas A. Kellner is Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections. He was appointed in December 2005. Prior to becoming Co-Chair of the New York State Board of Elections, he served as the Democratic commissioner from Manhattan on the New York City Board of Elections from 1993 to 2005. Kellner was one of the first proponents of a voter verifiable paper audit trail for electronic voting machines. He was the leader of the opposition to New York City’s contract to purchase unverifiable direct recording electronic voting machines. Kellner is a partner in the law firm of Kellner Herlihy Getty & Friedman, LLP. He specializes in the area of Real Estate Litigation and represents a large number of tenants groups, cooperatives, and some non-profit institutional landlords. Mr. Kellner received considerable attention in 1986 when he revived New York’s Bawdy House Law, first enacted in 1840, and used it as a device where neighbors could seek to evict drug dealers. His use of this overlooked law for that purpose was quickly copied by district attorneys and housing authorities throughout the country. 

Justin Moore, Ph.D., is a Senior Software Engineer with Google in Mountain View, CA. He has been a member of the Datacenter Software team since 2006, working to improve the efficiency of Google’s fleet of datacenters. In his spare “20%” time at Google, he has worked with the Voting Information Project to help standardize the publication of election-related data and provide voters with better tools for accessing this information. His PhD dissertation at Duke University explored how to schedule jobs in a datacenter with the goal of reducing the total cost of ownership; this was achieved by modeling and predicting the power, cooling, and hardware reliability effects of running computational tasks on different servers. Also while at Duke, he was an expert witness to both the North Carolina and Virginia state legislative subcommittees on voting reform. His contributions in North Carolina helped pass a comprehensive election reform bill in 2005 that has served as a model for dozens of other state-level reforms.

Peter Neumann, Ph.D. has doctorates from Harvard and Darmstadt. After 10 years at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the 1960s, during which he was heavily involved in the Multics development jointly with MIT and Honeywell, he has been in SRI’s Computer Science Lab since September 1971. He moderates the ACM Risks Forum, has been responsible for CACM’s Inside Risks columns monthly from 1990 to 2007, tri-annually since then, chairs the ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, and chairs the National Committee for Voting Integrity. 

Aviel D. Rubin, Ph.D. is Professor of Computer Science and Technical Director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Rubin was a research scientist at AT&T Labs. Rubin has testified before the U.S. House and Senate on multiple occasions, and he is author of several books including Brave New Ballot (Random House, 2006) Firewalls and Internet Security, second edition (with Bill Cheswick and Steve Bellovin, Addison Wesley, 2003), White-Hat Security Arsenal (Addison Wesley, 2001), and Web Security Sourcebook (with Dan Geer and Marcus Ranum, John Wiley & Sons, 1997). He is Associate  Editor of ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Associate Editor of IEEE Security & Privacy, and an Advisory Board member of Springer’s Information Security and Cryptography Book Series. In January, 2004 Baltimore Magazine name Rubin a Baltimorean of the Year for his work in safeguarding the integrity of our election process, and he is also the recipient of the 2004 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. Rubin has a B.S, (’89), M.S.E (’91), and Ph.D. (’94) from the University of Michigan. 

Ion Sancho is the Supervisor of Elections for Leon County, Florida.  Serving since January 1989, he has been reelected to five additional terms.  One of only three (out of 67) supervisors of elections in Florida without party affiliation, Mr. Sancho has devoted special attention to studying voting technologies and increasing citizen participation in our electoral system.  Under his administration Leon County’s voter turnout percentage has consistently ranked among the highest of Florida’s 67 counties, with a record setting 86% turnout in the November 2008 General Election. Mr. Sancho was appointed by the Florida Supreme Court in December of 2000 as the technical expert to oversee the Florida Recount effort and was recognized by the Leon County Board of County Commissioners for providing “statistically the cleanest county elections in the state” during that infamous election.  In 2005, Mr. Sancho sanctioned the first tests of voting machines by voting integrity experts, independent of the vendors.  His action were captured in the 2007 Emmy nominated film, “Hacking Democracy.”

Ion Sancho was the first Florida election official to attain national certification in 1996 (Certified Elections Registration Official, the Election Center).  He is regularly interviewed by national and local media and has presented testimony before the United States Congress, the United States Election Assistance Committee, and the United States Civil Rights Commission.  In 1998, he co-authored the first national Principles and Standards of Conduct of Elections/Registrations Officials.  In 2008, the Leon County Supervisor of Elections Office received the National Freedom Award for outstanding innovations in the field of elections.

John E. Savage, Ph.D. is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He earned his PhD in Electrical Engineering at MIT in coding and communication theory and joined Bell Laboratories in 1965 and Brown University in 1967. In 1979 he co-founded the Department of Computer Science at Brown and served as its second chair from 1985 to 1991. His research has centered on theoretical computer science and currently includes cybersecurity, computational nanotechnology, the performance of multicore chips, and reliable computing with unreliable elements. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of AAAS and ACM, and a Life Fellow of IEEE. He served as Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State in 2009-2010. 

Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer, BT. Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, referred to by The Economist as a “security guru.” He is the author of eight books — including the best sellers Beyond Fear, Secrets and Lies, and Applied Cryptography — as well as hundreds of articles and essays in national and international publications, and many more academic papers. His influential newsletter “Crypto-Gram,” and his blog “Schneier on Security,” are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, and is regularly quoted in the press.

Warren Slocum is a member of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors from the 4th district. Prior to his election to the Board of Supervisors in 2012, Slocum  served as the Chief Elections Officer & Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder of San Mateo County.  As Chief Elections Officer, he introduced accessible voting equipment with language and adaptive features to ensure that ALL voters could participate in fair, private and secure elections. As Recorder, he oversaw the conversion of recorded paper documents to recorded electronic documents and the creation of a publicly searchable database which made it easy to research property information.  He is also one of San Mateo County’s representative on a number of Boards and Commissions including the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Domestic Violence Council, HOPE Interagency Council (Housing Our People Effectively), Redwood City 2020, the Workforce investment Board, and an alternate on the San Francisquito Creek JPA and LAFCO, the independent commission with jurisdiction over the boundaries of the 20 cities, 22 independent special districts and many of the 35 County-governed special districts serving San Mateo County.

Vanessa Teague is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, specializing in end-to-end verifiable cryptographic protocols for electronic elections. Her Ph.D. work with Prof. John Mitchell at Stanford University was on combining ideas from cryptography and game theory in order to understand distributed computations with selfish participants.  Since then she has focused on verifiable and private cryptographic protocols for electronic voting, with a particular focus on protocols that work for Australia’s unusual and complicated voting system. She has also written several opinion pieces on electronic voting trials in Australia, all under the auspices of The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE).  These have mostly explained that software advertised as secure, private or verifiable was nothing of the kind.  She has been invited to testify at various election-related inquiries of Australia’s federal and state parliaments, at which she attempted to explain what did, and did not, constitute verifiable electronic voting. Her current project is helping to design an end-to-end verifiable attendance voting system, based on prêt à voter, for use in state elections in Victoria.

Michael Ubell, Software Architect, Berkeley Database Group, Oracle. Ubell began his career working on the original Ingres project at the University of California.He has served in engineering and management roles at Britton Lee,Digital Equipment Corporation, Illustra and Informix.Heholds a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from Hampshire College and a MA in Computer Science from theUniversity of California at Berkeley. 

Nancy Wallace is a Maryland Voting Activist affiliated with the Campaign for Verifiable Voting in Maryland. Background: Experienced lobbyist and volunteer organizer. Wallace has worked for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), as supervisor of a team of three software testers handling 12 of the 13 national computer systems which support case adjudication by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. She is also in charge of process compliance, or what the Program Manual terms quality control, for the software development and testing.

The Verified Voting Foundation, Inc. is an educational nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation. Our EIN is 20-0765743. Contributions to the Verified Voting Foundation are tax-deductible to the extent provided by law. Please donate to support our important work.

Verified Voting Foundation Articles of Incorporation (PDF)

Verified Voting Foundation Bylaws (PDF)

Verified Voting Foundation IRS 501(c)(3) determination letter (PDF)

Nondiscrimination, Anti-Harassment, and Accommodation Policy

The Verified Voting Foundation holds diversity as a core organizational value and seeks to incorporate diversity in all organizational programs and facilities. The Verified Voting Foundation encourages qualified individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing special accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please make an inquiry to the contact listed below before your visit or participation.

The Verified Voting Foundation is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to programs, facilities, and employment without regard to personal characteristics not related to ability, performance, or qualifications as determined by organizational policy or by local, state, or federal authorities. It is the policy of the organization to maintain an environment free of discrimination, including harassment. The Verified Voting Foundation prohibits discrimination and harassment against any person because of age, race, color, national origin, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, health status (HIV/AIDS/Cancer), personal appearance, familial status, citizenship, or veteran status. Discrimination or harassment will not be tolerated at the Verified Voting Foundation.

Please direct all inquiries regarding the nondiscrimination and accommodation policy to: Verified Voting Foundation PO Box 4104, Carlsbad, CA 92018 Tel.+1 760-434-VOTE (8683) Fax +1 321-600-6860 Email info@verifiedvoting.org

This website was designed and built by Radical Designs, Blohm Creative Partners, and Verified Voting.

Front Page Image Credits: “Indiana Early Voting” AP/Michael Conroy; “Paper Prophets” Aurich Dawson, posted at Ars Tecnica; “Political Ads” Brian Cahn/ZUMA Press/Corbis; “Binary Code”, stock image; Icons by Nika Korniyenko, ArtNika.com.

Much of the content on this website was excerpted with permission from two sources: Counting Votes 2012: A State by State Look at Voting Technology Preparedness, Verified Voting Foundation, Common Cause, and Rutgers School of Law, 2012; and Douglas W. Jones and Barbara Simons, Broken Ballots, 2012. We are grateful to all who contributed to this website.