Professor Douglas Jones, a nationally renowned expert in voting

[truckin]

technology, will be presenting Expert Testimony to Connecticut's Voting Technology Standards Board

When? Friday January 12, 2006

What Time? Approximately 12 Noon

Where? Legislative Office Building

Who is Doug Jones?

Douglas W. Jones has been a Professor of computer science at the University of Iowa since 1980. He has gained considerable expertise in the area of voting technology having served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems since 1994. He chaired the board from Fall 1999 to early 2003. This board, appointed by the Secretary of State, must examine and approve all voting machines before they can be offered for sale to county governments. His expertise in this area has put him in great demand since the election mess in 2000 - frequently quoted in the national media. Professor Jones is presently an advisor to Miami-Dade County, FL., assisting them with voting system problems. He is also a consultant with the Brennan Center for Justice on voting related issues.

Why is Professor Jones expected to be of Interest?

Take a LOOK!

Douglas Jones, associate professor of computer science in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a five-year, $800,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to investigate the use of electronic voting systems in U.S. elections.

(I-Newswire) - The UI grant is part of a $7.5 million NSF project called ACCURATE ( A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections ) that includes researchers from the UI, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, SRI International, Rice University and Johns Hopkins University. The center, under the leadership of Aviel Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, will coordinate the work of 10 of the nation's leading experts in electronic voting, computer security, public policy issues relating to the use of computers and human-computer interaction.

Jones, the former chair of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems on which he served for a decade, is nationally known as a critic of electronic voting technology. Last summer, he consulted on election security and pre-election testing for the Miami-Dade County Elections Department. He has found serious security problems with several widely used voting systems.

In a talk Jones gave in Washington in December 2005 to a panel on Electronic Voting convened by the Computer Science and Telecommunications board of The National Academy of Sciences, he said, "In most areas of computer science, we are willing to accept systems where a proof that the system is correct is more complex than the system itself. In contrast, whatever technology is used in elections must be sufficiently simple and sufficiently transparent that its correctness is apparent to large numbers of observers."

He went on to say: "We must build voting systems where the integrity of the system does not rest on a single mechanism and the assumption that the mechanism is perfectly administered. Instead, we must adopt a policy of defense in depth, where multiple layers of defense protect against the failure of any given layer."

Jones's publications include a chapter in the book Secure Electronic Voting, and the article, Auditing Elections, published last October. He testified in October 2004 before a Congressional Black Caucus hearing on election preparedness in Washington, D.C., telling the group that although there have been numerous changes in voting technology since 2000, the problems associated with the 2000 election were largely procedural and administrative, not technological. Consequently, the major promises of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 remain unfulfilled.

His other numerous appearances include testifying before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission's hearings on Florida and the 2000 Election, the U.S. House Science Committee on the Help America Vote Act, and the Federal Election Commission on the 2002 draft voting system standards.