Not Quite a Blog

We had a wonderful first day at EVT/WOTE 2009, yesterday. More than 80 of the best thinkers in voting technology are here mixing it up in Montreal. We have computer scientists, usability experts, legal experts, advocates and voting system vendors all in attendance.

The first bit of business was awarding our Best Paper award. The Best Paper went to: Electing a University President Using Open-Audit Voting: Analysis of Real-World Use of Helios (PDF) by Ben Adida (Harvard University), Olivier de Marneffe, Olivier Pereira, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater (Université catholique de Louvain).

This work involved the first binding use of the Helios open-audit voting system where more than 5,000 ballots were cast. This is a very important step on the path to using types of cryptographic voting systems in real elections. Congratulations to the authors!

I've been taking pictures and have posted them at Flickr. Audio from the talks should be available at some point via USENIX.

Here are some short notes with pictures from the event:

Our keynote was delivered by Lawrence Norden, Senior Counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice and NYU's Voting Technology Project. In my opinion, no one has done more to forward voting technology policy than Larry. Larry contextualized the varied work being presented at the workshop and then talked in depth about how research can help to move policy.

The Honorable Rush Holt (NJ) gave our first invited talk. He talked about the role of science in policy and emphasized how important it is for science to be actively involved with Congress.

The first EVT/WOTE Rump Session was chaired by the incomparable Eric Rescorla... and it was a smashing success. We had over 14 informal presentations of preliminary work, work to be presented in other venues (like ACM CCS), work no one intended to start but that was done anyway and a number of very humorous presentations. The highlight to me, which some missed by leaving early, was Mark Lindeman's debut as a singer/songwriter with his folk song "Plaudits for Post-Election Audits". Video, released with permission from Mark is here: http://www.vimeo.com/6048375

Other pics:

Even dinner is for deep thinking: