Our Perspective

AAAS Meeting on U.S.

Voting System/Election Reform
29 September 2005
mail@electionscience.org
 About Us

The Election Science Institute (ESI) is a non-partisan, non-profit

scientific organization, founded in 2002 and based in San Francisco.
ESI monitors public elections in the U.S. to identify voting
anomalies, and works directly with election officials to help them
implement systems that will increase accuracy, accountability and
transparency.

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 State of Affairs
• No baseline of standards
• Little measurement capabilities
• Limited historical data (and no data on new systems)
• Restricted election community
• Strong emotions

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 Challenges

• Measuring margins of victory smaller than 5% (victory < error)

• HAVA forces transitioning to new system (unlimited pts. of failure)
• Public’s limited patience
• Creating a collaborative environment

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 Educational Challenges

General Population
– Paper trail has dominated debate
– Irregularities affect all candidates
– Activist Groups propagate anecdotal data

Poll Workers
– Technological competency
– Training and certification process
– Educating/Recruiting younger Americans

Election Officials
– Need for outside assistance
– Public’s demand for accountability and transparency
– System complexities: no trained systems design and scientific analysis

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 Some of our Ongoing Projects

• Mitigating voter wait times

• Recount methodology
• Mitigating security threats

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 Our Choice: Non Action

• In absence of data , advocacy groups will use fraud to explain

irregularities
• New electronic systems will exhibit new behavior that is not
understood
• Irregularities will continue to be leveraged for political advantage
• Election officials will continue to close ranks as a result of increasing
outside skepticism
• Public’s confidence in elections decrease... Political leaders ability to
lead is diminished

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 Our Responsibility: Apply our Knowledge & Skill

• Industrial Engineers are needed to develop optimized process flows for election
systems
• Human Factors Engineers are required to design critical election forms and ballots
• Statisticians must help develop appropriate count verification methodologies
• Computer Security Experts are needed to identify and mitigate electronic security
threats

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 Thank You

Confidence in our election system will not be achieved

until America’s scientific community demonstrates the will to
design and help implement a transparent, auditable and manageable
election system.

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