MIT, Caltech Join Forces to Develop Reliable, Uniform U.S. Voting Machine - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - California Institute of Technology - Brief Article

Black Issues in Higher Education, Jan 4, 2001

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

The presidents of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology recently announced a collaborative project to develop an easy-to-use, reliable, affordable and secure United States voting machine that will prevent a recurrence of the problems that plagued the 2000 presidential election.

"It is embarrassing to America when technology fails and puts democracy to such a test as it did ...," says Caltech president Dr. David Baltimore. "Academic institutions have a responsibility to help repair the voting process so that we don't see anything like this again. This project is intended to protect the system from the problems we've seen in the last election."

MIT president Dr. Charles M. Vest, echoes Baltimore's concern for the security and credibility of the voting process.

"We must find a solution. Each of us must be confident that his or her vote has been reliably recorded and counted. A country that has put a man on the moon and an ATM machine on every corner has no excuse," says Vest.

Carnegie Corporation President Vartan Gregorian says he will recommend the Corporation board fund the $250,000 initial phase of the research.

The grant will be used by a team of two professors from each university who are experts in technology, design and political science. The four members of the team are MIT professors Stephen Ansolabehere of political science and Nicholas Negroponte, who is also chairman of the MIT Media Lab; and Caltech professors Thomas Palfrey of political science and economics and Jehoshua Brock of computation and neural systems and electrical engineering.