Professor Deirdre K. Mulligan, Boalt Hall professor and director of the law school’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, is one of a group of academic experts who have joined in a national effort to improve the reliability and trustworthiness of electronic voting technology.
Funded by a $7.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation and based at Johns Hopkins University, A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections, or ACCURATE, brings together authorities in computer science, law and usability in the first large-scale academic effort to improve electronic voting systems.
“The 2000 presidential election and ensuing legal challenges were a stark reminder that the machinery of democracy matters,” said Mulligan, who will serve as a co-principal investigator at the new center. “Legal and policy concerns must be taken into consideration during the research and design process to ensure that the next generation of voting systems reflects our democratic commitments to equality, accessibility, privacy and security.”
ACCURATE’s principal investigator will be Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins professor of computer science and technical director of the university’s Information Security Institute. Among Mulligan’s co-principal investigators will be UC Berkeley’s David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science. UC Berkeley is expected to receive about $1.3 million from the NSF grant for its ACCURATE research.