[talks] J Calandrino generals

[Melissa M Lawson]

 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.