Elections, Cyberwarfare, and the Future of American Democracy: Will Your Vote be Disarmed?

Elections, Cyberwarfare, and the Future of American Democracy:

Will Your Vote Be Disarmed?

cybersecurity serves critical infrastructures

September 30th, 2020
12:00–1:30pm

Elections are fundamental foundations of a functioning democracy. Attempts to prevent voter participation represents a clear and present danger to the future of our political system. Various means of restricting voter registration, access to different forms of balloting, and vote tabulation have been known for some time. Cyberwarfare exacerbates these challenges as a new method of attack on elections. Cyberwarfare involves the actions by hostile domestic and foreign actors to attack and attempt to damage computers or information networks through computer viruses, social media, or voter suppression in order to disrupt and delegitimize our political institutions. The old and new methods targeting the electoral process are intimately connected and becoming more sophisticated. Join our webinar as panelists discuss the scope of challenges American voters face and the implications of traditional and cyber-related attacks that aim to disrupt and discredit our democracy.

Panelists

Birol A. Yeşilada

Birol A. Yeşilada is the Director of the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government and professor of Political Science and International Studies at Portland State University. He is the holder of the endowed chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies at PSU, current Vice President of the International Studies Association and is a member of the Board of TransResearch Consortium. Dr. Yeşilada has been an invited policy consultant at the U.S. State Department and various agencies of the U.S. government, the Council on Foreign Relations, RAND, Booz Allen Hamilton, Nathan Associates, Barclays Capital, the World Bank, and is an Academic Associate of the Atlantic Council. In 2003, he was invited by the White House and participated in the commission that drafted the new Constitution of Afghanistan.

Douglas W. Jones

Douglas W. Jones is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. Jones served on the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems from 1994 to 2004. Jones has consulted with the ACLU (Illinois Chapter), Miami-Dade County, the Arizona Senate Government Accountability and Reform Committee, the Brennan Center for Justice and several other organizations on voting related issues. Jones made significant contributions to the 2006 revision of New York's voting system standards, and he served on the election observation missions for the 2005 and 2007 elections in Kazakhstan and the 2006 election in the Netherlands for the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Jones has served as an expert witness in a number of voting-related lawsuits, including Jill Stein's recount suits in Michigan and Wisconsin after the 2016 election and several earlier suits.

Stephanie Singer

Stephanie Singer has assembled, analyzed and explained data for private business, public agencies, campaigns and election oversight. Her public service projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Knight Foundation. Her client list includes the Orange County Registrar of Voters, the open source election technology company Free & Fair and the nonpartisan nonprofit Verified Voting. In 2019 she joined the faculty of the Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. From 2012-2016 she served on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections — including one year as chair — improving communication, modernizing processes, rooting out corruption and protecting voters’ rights. She won the post by defeating a 36-year incumbent in a citywide election. Singer co-chaired the statewide Election Reform Committee of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania and is an active member of the national Election Verification Network. Singer studied math and computer science at Yale and Stanford, completed a Ph.D. at New York University and earned tenure from Haverford College. She has written two books on mathematical physics.

Matthew Bishop

Matt Bishop received his Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue University, where he specialized in computer security, in 1984. He is on the faculty at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis. His main research area is the analysis of vulnerabilities in computer systems, including modeling them, building tools to detect vulnerabilities, and ameliorating or eliminating them. Currently, he has research projects involving data sanitization, modeling election processes and attribution in large-scale testbeds such as GENI; he is also looking at the “insider” problem. He also teaches software engineering, machine architecture, operating systems, programming and (of course) computer security.

Phil Keisling

Phil Keisling’s career over four decades has included stints in the worlds of journalism, elective politics, the private sector, and academia. In 2019, he retired from his most recent job, as director of the Center for Public Service in the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. He has devoted much of his time since to his volunteer work as founder and chair of the National Vote at Home Institute.

Keisling’s journalism career included four years as an investigative reporter for Portland’s Willamette Week, followed by two years as an editor for the Washington Monthly magazine in Washington D.C from 1982 to 1984. Keisling then returned to Oregon, where he worked as a legislative staff assistant to Oregon’s Speaker of the House of Representatives, Vera Katz, prior to being elected a State Representative himself in 1988.

In 1991, Keisling was appointed Oregon Secretary of State by Governor Barbara Roberts. He was then elected and re-elected to this statewide position, whose duties included oversight of the state election system. During his tenure, he helped lead the successful effort to make Oregon the nation’s first state to conduct all elections by automatically mailing ballots to all active registered voters.

After leaving elected politics, Keisling worked as an Executive Vice President with CorSource Technology Group, an Oregon-based software services company, and then worked at PSU from 2010 through 2019.

Keisling graduated from Yale in 1977 with a Bachelors degree in American Studies.

Moderator

Rick Rolf

Rick Rolf's multifaceted career has spanned the gamut of crisis management and media strategist, political, diplomatic and corporate policy advisor and troubleshooter, public servant, writer and educator. He is a Senior Fellow at Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government where his popular course, “Truth Lies. Politics and Policy”, has attracted significant media attention nation-wide. Rolf directed the international governmental and public affairs role in the U.S.- Canadian Columbia River Treaty pre-negotiation review. Rolf served as senior foreign policy adviser, chief campaign strategist and spokesman for legendary anti-war US Senator Mark O. Hatfield, one of the most dominant figures in the US foreign policy debates and decisions of the post-Vietnam Cold War era. Rolf was later a member of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s “Strategic Insider” group, advising Richardson during his quest for the 2008 Democratic nomination for President. He was subsequently an advisor to Democratic nominee Barack Obama’s foreign policy team in mock preparations for the national security debate with Senator John McCain. Rolf is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, with a Master of Public Administration degree. He also earned a master’s degree with Honors from Georgetown University where he concentrated on foreign policy and human values studies. His undergraduate degree in International Affairs was earned at Lewis and Clark College where he was later awarded the “Distinguished Alumni” award. In addition, Rolf earned Harvard’s NISM degree for senior managers in national and international security and completed Stanford University’s Mass Communications program.