Joe Calandrino will present his research seminar/general exam on Tuesday October 2 at 2PM in Room 402. The members of his committee are Ed Felten, Andrew Appel, and David Walker. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ----------------------------- Title: Machine-Assisted Election Auditing Abstract: Election audit procedures usually rely on precinct-based audits, in which workers manually review all paper ballots from selected polling places, but these audits can be expensive due to the labor required. In this talk, I propose an alternative audit strategy that allows machines to perform most of the work. Precincts are audited using recounting machines, and their output is manually audited using efficient ballot sampling techniques. This strategy can achieve equal or greater confidence than precinct-based auditing at a significantly lower cost while protecting voter privacy better than previous ballot-based auditing methods. I show how to determine which ballots to audit against the auditing machines' records and compare this new approach to precinct-based audits in the context of Virginia's November 2006 election. Far fewer ballots need to be audited by hand using our approach. I also explore extensions to these techniques, such as varying individual ballots' audit probabilities based on the votes they contain, that promise further efficiency gains. Reading List: 1. R. Anderson. Security Engineering. 2001. 2. N. Ferguson, B. Schneier. Practical Cryptography. 2003. 3. R. G. Saltman. The History and Politics of Voting Technology. 2006. 4. 110TH CONGRESS. H.R. 811: Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2007. 5. A. W. Appel. Effective Audit Policy for Voter-Verified Paper Ballots in New Jersey. 2007. 6. A. Cordero, D. Wagner, D. Dill. The Role of Dice in Election Audits. In Proc. 2006 IAVoSS Workshop On Trustworthy Elections (WOTE 2006). 7. D. Jefferson, E. Ginnold, K. Midstokke, K. Alexander, P. Stark, A. Lehmkuhl. Post-Election Audit Standards Working Group Report: Evaluation of Audit Sampling Models and Options for Strengthening California's Manual Count. 2007. 8. K. C. Johnson. Election Certification by Statistical Audit of Voter-Verified Paper Ballots. 2004. 9. C. A. Neff. Election Confidence: A Comparision of Methodologies and their Relative Effectiveness at Achieving It. 2003. 10. L. Norden, A. Burstein, J. L. Hall, M. Chen. Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections. 2007. 11. J. A. Aslam, R. A. Popa, R. L. Rivest. On Estimating the Size and Confidence of a Statistical Audit. In Proc. 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT '07). 12. R. L. Rivest. On Auditing Elections when Precincts Have Different Sizes. 2007.