California Secretary of State
A pioneer in open government, election integrity, and personal privacy rights, Debra Bowen became the sixth woman in California history elected to a constitutional office. As chief elections officer, Secretary Bowen is responsible for overseeing state and federal elections. Her goal is to ensure that voting machines certified for use are secure, accurate, and accessible, and every voter's ballot is counted as it was cast. Secretary Bowen was recognized for her national leadership in election integrity with the 2008 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage AwardTM, the nation's most prestigious honor for elected public servants who choose principles over partisanship.
Director, Mitch Kapor Foundation
Mitchell is a software designer, entrepreneur, activist and philanthropist. He founded Lotus Development Corporation in 1982 and designed Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer app" which made the PC ubiquitous in business. He was the founding investor of UUNET, Real Networks, and Linden Labs, the maker of Second Life. He is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation. He is also a trustee of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation and the Level Playing Field Institute, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in the workplace and support the values of an inclusive society.
Chief Development Officer, OSDV
Gregory is the Chief Development Officer for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (“OSDV”). He leads all aspects of the Foundation’s resource development, corporate partner alliances, public outreach, and government and legal affairs. OSDV is tackling the lack of trustworthy elections technology. This Silicon Valley based effort – known as the TrustTheVote Project – is designing and building next generation voting systems to serve as a draft standard for how election technology should work to ensure trust. All results are publicly owned and freely available for adoption by any election jurisdiction. Mr. Miller has 28+ years of technical and business experience in development and eventual commercialization of the Internet, dating back to the ARPANET and CSNET. He is a trained computer scientist, with graduate business education, and a law degree focused on intellectual property, technology law, and public policy. Greg’s technical background includes TCP/IP network architecture, user interface design, and object-oriented software development. Gregory is also active in the American Bar Association addressing technology law and public policy issues, including Cyberlaw, Information Privacy & Security, and Internet Governance. Greg is also a member of the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee, and a sustaining member of the Internet Society.
Executive Director, RockTheVote
In 2008, as President of Rock the Vote, Heather Smith led the organization to achieve its highest voter registration numbers in its 20-year history - 2.2 million individuals used Rock the Vote’s tools to register to vote. During the historic election season, Rock the Vote ran the largest non-partisan voter registration campaign in history that saw 22 million young voters cast a ballot. Prior to taking over Rock the Vote, Smith founded and directed Young Voter Strategies, a nonpartisan project in partnership with The Graduate School of Political Management at The George Washington University with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts. Young Voter Strategies provided the public, parties, candidates, consultants and nonprofits with data and research on the youth vote as well as best practices to effectively mobilize young people. In 2006, it coordinated the nation’s largest non-partisan project to register young voters - registering over 540,000 youth ages 18-30. Smith received a B.A. with honors in economics and public policy from Duke University. In 2006, Smith was named one of Campaign & Elections magazine’s Rising Stars for her work with young voters. She has also been named one of Esquire Magazine’s Best and Brightest of 2007.
Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County
Dean Logan was appointed Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County, California on July 9, 2008, previously serving as the Acting Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk and as Chief Deputy. In this position he is responsible for registering voters, maintaining voter files, administering federal, state, local and special elections and verifying initiatives, referenda and recall petitions. Los Angeles County, with more than 500 political districts and 4.3 million registered voters, is the largest and most complex county election jurisdiction in the country. Mr. Logan has over 20 years experience in public service in state and local government having held various elections offices in the State of Washington prior to moving to Southern California. He currently serves on the California Secretary of State’s VoteCal Statewide Voter Registration System Advisory Committee, The Election Center’s National Task Forces on Education & Training and Election Reform and on Pew’s Voter Registration Modernization Design Working Group. In 2007, he served as an International Election Observer in Morocco with the National Democratic Institute. He has also traveled to China on a political leadership exchange and to the former Soviet Union as part of a citizen diplomacy delegation.
Please join California Secretary of State Debra Bowen and esteemed pioneer of the personal computing revolution Mitch Kapor for an evening of conversation about the future of American elections systems – how America will cast ballots in a digital age and how we can restore trust in our election systems.
Elections in the last decade indicate that our voting systems are far from reliable or accurate and lack necessary transparency. You may wonder what is to become of the existing "industry" for voting equipment, when only two vendors remain to serve the majority of elections systems nationwide, including L.A. County. We’ll discuss:
OSDV Foundation’s Co-Executive Director, Gregory Miller, will introduce you to a non-profit Silicon Valley project making headway to reinvent the nation’s voting systems. Not just another think-tank writing white papers or pushing for legislative reform, the Foundation’s TrustTheVote Project is building transparent publicly-owned technology that people can see, touch, and try, and governments can freely adopt and deploy.
And the effort is holistic. CEO of Rock the Vote, Heather Smith, will round out our discussion with an outlook on the modernization of voter registration through open source technology.
With an aging voting system and a diverse voting constituency made up of an increasing number of individuals who have grown up with computers and cell phones, Los Angeles County launched the Voting Systems Assessment Project in September 2009. The goal: for policy experts, technology leaders and the voting public to define the needs and parameters of the next generation voting system - a system that has to reflect characteristics of security, transparency, accuracy and accessibility. Dean Logan will be addressing these issues and this timely initiative.