[Sci-tech-public] MAS.966 (H) Course Announcement: Voting Technology: What Has Beenand What Can Be

[Ted Selker]

MAS.966 (H)
Voting Technology:  What Has Been and What Can Be

Ted Selker with members of the Caltech/MIT Voting Project + guests

MIT Media Lab, Fall 2004
MAS.966 (H), Special Topics in Technology, (0-9-0)
Thursday 3:30—5:00 PM, Location: E15-468H


Whose vote counts in an election?   Voting process does affect election
results.   For the first time in history we are in a position to create
technology and processes that can probably allow detection and correction
of human error and fraud in voting.  Improving voting technology should be
central to protecting our democratic process.  As well, it can instill
confidence in our government and system.  Digital technology may even
improve our government.

Improved voting technology can also transfer to other areas.  Solving
problems of disenfranchisement of people relative to socioeconomic,
physical, and cognitive disabilities in voting can be applied to other
universal access problems.  Solving problems of security, reliability and
integrity in voting can help improve other transaction processing systems.

This course will survey voting systems and how they can be improved. We
discuss user experience, reliability, security and integrity of voting
systems. The course will consist of weekly topic areas and lectures from
voting technology experts. Topics will follow the largest areas of lost
votes and topics of public debate.

Sources of 4 to 6 million lost votes in the American 2000 election:
      Registration—Can it be accurate?
      Ballot design—Can ballot design be fair?
      Polling place operations—Can polling places let everyone vote?

Sources of more lost ballots:
      Absentee ballots—Can the vote selling and stealing be stopped?
      Electronic technology—Can it improve security, integrity and
reliability?

Scenarios for reducing voter coercion.

Proposed Schedule:

   Sep  9:   Overview: Voting as an end-to-end user experience, Ted Selker
   Sep 16:  Universal verifiability all the spots where things can go
   wrong, Ted Selker
   Sep 23:  History of Voting Machines, Charles Stewart
   Sep 30:  Optical Character Recognition Voting in Spain, Inaki
   Goirizelaia
   Oct   7:  Security in Voting Elections, Ron Rivest
   Oct 14:  Student Research & Evaluations, Ted Selker
   Oct 21:  Analysis of Residual Votes in Elections, Charles Stewart
   Oct 28:  Voting Machines and Processes, Ted Selker
   Nov   4:  What happened!, Ted Selker
   Nov 18:  Software Development for Voting, Ted Selker
   Dec  2:  The Strange Ways People Vote, Steve Ansolabehere
   Dec  9:  If only we changed everything about voting

Students will be required to write two publication quality papers with
references.  Creating voting technology and technology evaluation
experiments can be traded for papers. Critiques of weekly readings are also
required.