Punchscan Team

Richard Carback

Richard Carback is a graduate student in Computer Science working in Information Assurance at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He completed his BS in Computer Science at UMBC in May of 2005. While an undergraduate he managed the computer systems for the student newspaper and spent school breaks working for L-3 Communications Corporation's Government Services Incorporated, formerly known as EER Systems, Integrated Base Defense Security Systems Contractor Logistics Support group. Rick is also developing Cyber Defense Exercises and maintaining the Cyber Defense Lab at UMBC.

Richard maintains the website for punchscan, and has been actively working on the web-based components of the punchscan system. He has also been working on images that allow the punchscan software to boot and run off of a USB stick or CD.

David Chaum

David Chaum, widely recognized as the inventor of electronic cash and other cryptographic techniques aimed at providing privacy, founded IACR, the major organization in the field of cryptographic research. While a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1981, he published the first solution to providing secure secret-ballot elections electronically.

He had created the SureVote system to provide secure elections in developing countries just before November 2000, and then adapted it for US elections. Later he published the Votegrity system for visual voting before developing PunchScan. He is a member of the ACCURATE and On the Identity Trail projects. He has also been active in and co-founded the WOTE series of workshops on technology for secure elections, founded VSPR to help develop performance measures for voting systems, and created VoComp as a way for universities to compete on their realizations of voting systems.

Jeremy Clark

Jeremy Clark is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo's Center for Applied Cryptographic Research. Aside from his research on Punchscan and voting, Jeremy has done work in mix networks, usablity, economics of information security, and cryptography.

Aleks Essex

Aleks Essex is a doctoral candidate at University of Ottawa's School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) with a background in information security and its applications to electronic voting.

Stefan Popoveniuc

Stefan POPOVENIUC graduated from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, as an engineer in Computer Science in 2004. In the same year he started a doctoral program at George Washington University. He worked on a couple of voting systems, particularly, he made a full implementations and performance evaluation of the Citizen Verified Voting (a voting system invented by David Chaum, that uses visual crypto). His academic interests include cryptography, anonymity, privacy, e-cash and networks. Bridge and fencing are among the non-academic interests. For PunchScan, Stefan wrote the main engine, the voting booth software and collaborated with Ben Hosp for a couple of articles.

Stefan has written the software to scan ballots and to the core punchscan cryptographic protocols.

Past Contributors

Ben Hosp

Ben Hosp has a B.S. in Computer Science from Roanoke College in Salem, VA, and is currently working on a PhD in Computer Science from the George Washington University. He was involved in the Citizen-Verified Voting project at GWU in early 2004, which produced an implementation of David Chaum's earlier visual-cryptography-based voting system. He has been working on various aspects of cryptographic electronic voting ever since.

Ben wrote an introduction to punchscan with Stefan and has been working on voting models.

Kevin Fisher

Kevin Fisher is a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. He received his B.S. in Computer Engineering and B.S. in Mathematics from UMBC in 2005. He served for two years as chair of the University's student branch of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). His current research interests include human-aware computing and high integrity election systems.

Kevin has written a paper regarding the necessary physical components of punchscan and earlier worked on software that would create pdfs of the current punchscan ballots.

Jeremy Robin

Jeremy Robin is a Software Engineer at Cloudmark, a San Francisco based start-up which specializes in anti-spam software. He received his B.S in Computer Science from Dartmouth College in 2001 and his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University in June 2006. He developed glucose meters for 2 years at Abbott Laboratories, MediSense products before deciding to move out to California and return to school. His current research is focused on system design, network security, and cryptography though a strong interest in music also led him to develop Fastab, an automatic musical notation solution for mandolin and guitar players.

Jeremy has written a number of online demos for punchscan.