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Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report (2010)

Chapter: Appendix F: Biographical Information

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
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F
Biographical Information

COMMITTEE MEMBERS

Frances Ulmer, Co-chair, is the chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, bringing to this position 30 years of experience in public policy in Alaska. Previously, she was a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research. In the early 1980s, she was the mayor of Juneau, then became a member of the Alaska House of Representatives (1986-1994), and in 1994 became the first female lieutenant governor of Alaska. In that year, she was appointed to the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission by President Bill Clinton and served on this international board for 11 years. She has participated in numerous panels, task forces, commissions, and forums as a speaker, moderator, and panelist to address the intersection of science, economics, politics, and policy. She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the National Parks Conservation Association, the Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Alaska Nature Conservancy Board. At the national level, Ms. Ulmer has served as a member of the above-mentioned North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission, the Federal Communications Commission’s State and Local Advisory Committee, and the Federal Elections Commissions Committee. She has a B.A. in political science and economics and a Law Degree from the University of Wisconsin.


Olene Walker, Co-chair, was the first woman governor of the state of Utah. Before being appointed as governor, she served as the first woman lieutenant governor of Utah. During her time in office, Dr. Walker spearheaded many important initiatives, including education programs, budget security measures, health care reform, and workforce development. She also worked to implement the federal “motor voter” legislation in Utah and oversaw the plan to bring Utah into compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). She has chaired the National Conference of Lieutenant Governors and is a past president of the National Association of Secretaries of State. She was the first lieutenant governor ever to serve as the president of that organization. Dr. Walker received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Brigham Young University, Stanford University, and the University of Utah, respectively.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
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Rakesh Agrawal, NAE, is a Microsoft Technical Fellow at the newly founded Search Labs. His areas of expertise are in developing fundamental data mining concepts and technologies and pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGKDD First Innovation Award, ACM-SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award, VLDB 10-Year Most Influential Paper Award, and the Computerworld First Horizon Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a fellow of IEEE. Scientific American named him to the list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003. Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2006, Dr. Agrawal was an IBM fellow and led the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Earlier, he was with the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, from 1983 to 1989. He also worked for 3 years at India’s premier company, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He also holds a B.E. degree in electronics and communication engineering from IIT-Roorkee, as well as a 2-year postgraduate diploma in industrial engineering from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Bombay.


R. Michael Alvarez is a professor of political science at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). His research interests have been in the areas of elections and electoral behavior, survey methodology, statistics and political methodology, and more recently, election administration. Professor Alvarez is currently the co-director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project and recently co-authored a book published by the Brookings Institution Press, Point, Click and Vote: The Future of Internet Voting. Professor Alvarez received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in political science from Duke University and his B.A., magna cum laude, in political science from Carleton College.


Gary W. Cox, NAS, is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. In addition to numerous articles in the areas of legislative and electoral politics, Professor Cox is author of The Efficient Secret (winner of the Samuel H. Beer dissertation prize in 1983 and of the 2003 George H. Hallett Award), coauthor of Legislative Leviathan (winner of the Richard F. Fenno Prize in 1993), author of Making Votes Count (winner of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the Luebbert Prize, and the Best Book in Political Economy Award in 1998), and coauthor of Elbridge Gerry’s Salamander: The Electoral Consequences of the Reapportionment Revolution. His latest book, Setting the Agenda, was published in 2005. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Professor Cox was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. He received a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1983.


Paula Hawthorn, retired, serves as a consultant and continues her involvement with the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California in 1979. Her thesis topic was on the performance of database systems. She has spent much of her career as a manager of database development, including vice-president of Software Development for start-ups such as Britton Lee and Illustra, and both management and individual contributor positions at Hewlett-Packard (working on database performance issues) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.


Sarah Ball Johnson currently serves as the executive director of the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s State Board of Elections. She has 15 years of experience in election administration on the state level. She has a bachelor of arts degree in business administration from Transylvania University and a master of public administration degree, specializing in state and local government, from the University of Kentucky. She participated in four international election observation trips, to Slovakia, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Nigeria. She is a member of the National Association of State Election Directors and serves as the secretary of the association’s executive board. She serves on the Election Assistance Commission Board

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
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of Advisors and serves on the Election Assistance Commission Standards Board. She is a member of the Election Center.


Jeff Jonas is a distinguished engineer and chief scientist of Entity Analytic Solutions at IBM. He is responsible for shaping the overall technical strategy of next-generation identity analytics and the use of this new capability in the overall IBM technology strategy. The IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group was formed based on technologies he developed as the founder and chief scientist of Systems Research & Development (SRD). SRD was acquired by IBM in January 2005. He applies his real-world experience in software design and development to drive technology innovations while delivering higher levels of privacy and civil liberties protections. He is a member of the Markle Foundation Task Force on National Security in the Information Age and actively contributes on issues of privacy, technology, and homeland security to leading national think tanks, privacy advocacy groups, and policy research organizations, including the Center for Democracy and Technology, Heritage Foundation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense Highlands Forum.


Denise Lamb is the chief deputy clerk for Elections in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, and has held that position for four years. She began her work in election administration in 1991 as a legislative analyst for the New Mexico Secretary of State and in 1993 was responsible for the implementation of the National Voter Registration Act in the state. Ms. Lamb was named as State Election Director in 1994 and held that position until 1997, returning in 1999-2004. Denise Lamb is a past-president of the National Association of State Election Directors and was co-chair of that group’s Voting Systems/Independent Test Authority Accreditation Board. Ms. Lamb was New Mexico’s Election Director during the state’s project to transition to a statewide voter file, beginning in 1999 and finishing after the passage of the Help America Vote Act. Ms. Lamb’s responsibilities in Santa Fe County include supervision of all local, state, and federal elections held within the jurisdiction which has 88,500 registered voters. She also works on Native American voting rights issues, poll worker training, and with the legislature and county clerks on election legislation.


John Lindback is a senior officer for voter registration modernization at the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Pew Center on the States. From March 2001 to July 2009, he served as director of elections for the state of Oregon. His duties for the state included enforcing laws governing the conduct of elections in Oregon, enforcing Oregon’s campaign finance laws, administering the state’s initiative and referendum process, and publishing state voters’ pamphlets. Previously, he worked for 6 years as chief of staff for the lieutenant governor of Alaska, a job that included administrative oversight of Alaska’s statewide election system. In 2008 he served as president of the National Association of State Elections Directors (NASED). He also served as an Oregon representative to the U.S. Election Commission’s Standards Advisory Board and he serves as an advisor to Design for Democracy, an organization promoting better designs of ballots and other elections materials. His other experience in the public sector includes work as budget analyst, legislative finance aide, and public information officer. Mr. Lindback’s first career was newspaper reporting. After earning a journalism degree from the University of Arizona in 1976, he reported on politics and government for newspapers for 12 years.


Bruce McPherson was the 30th California secretary of state. The first 26 years of his career he worked in the newsroom of the family-owned Santa Cruz Sentinel, serving as sports editor, news reporter, city editor, and editor. During this time he served on, and was president of, numerous community organizations. In his 11 years in the California legislature, he focused his attention on education, environmental protection, and public safety. In the aftermath of the resignation in early 2005 of California’s secretary of state, he was nominated by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to be secretary of state. Mr. McPherson was confirmed unanimously in both the Senate and the Assembly. While in office, he updated the information technology required to meet election laws, and he oversaw three statewide elections and

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×

two special elections. Mr. McPherson graduated from Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo with a B.S. degree in journalism in 1965. He subsequently was given an honorary degree in humane letters from Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo in 2005.


Wendy Noren is county clerk of Boone County, Missouri, a position she has held since 1982, and she managed the election division of the office for 4 years prior to that. Ms. Noren is responsible for keeping records of the orders, rules, and proceedings of the County Commission. In addition, she is responsible for inspecting and reviewing all voter precinct boundaries within the county and conducting elections. Throughout this period, she has served as a programmer for all of the voter registration functions. Over the past 25 years, she has been one of the first to implement emerging technology for the county’s voter registration system—often years before most jurisdictions. As both the programmer and user, she has a unique perspective on the critical components of a voter registration system. Other administrative responsibilities of the clerk include maintaining payroll files, administering employee benefits, administering the records management budget, and procuring adequate insurance and bonding for the county’s assets and elected officials.


William Winkler is a principal researcher with the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He has published more than 130 papers and has developed eight (and counting) generalized computer systems for record linkage, edit/imputation, multipurpose and multiway sampling, text classification, and masking for public-use microdata. Dr. Winkler holds a Ph.D. in probability theory from Ohio State University.


Rebecca N. Wright is an associate professor of computer science at Rutgers University. She is also deputy director of the DIMACS Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. Prior to that, she was a professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology and a researcher in the Secure Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs. Her research spans the area of information security, including cryptography, privacy, foundations of computer security, and fault-tolerant distributed computing. She was a co-author of a study, “Statewide Databases of Registered Voters: Study of Accuracy, Privacy, Usability, Security, and Reliability Issues,” commissioned by USACM. She was an invited speaker in the National Academy of Engineering’s 2007 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University in 1994 and a B.A. from Columbia University in 1988.

CSTB STAFF

Herbert S. Lin is chief scientist, CSTB at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council of the National Academies, where he has been the study director for major projects on public policy and information technology. These studies include a 1996 study on national cryptography policy (Cryptography’s Role in Securing the Information Society), a 1991 study on the future of computer science (Computing the Future), a 1999 study of Defense Department systems for command, control, communications, computing, and intelligence (Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental Challenges), a 2000 study on workforce issues in high technology (Building a Workforce for the Information Economy), a 2002 study on protecting kids from Internet pornography and sexual exploitation (Youth, Pornography, and the Internet), a 2004 study on aspects of the FBI’s information technology modernization program (A Review of the FBI’s Trilogy IT Modernization Program), a 2005 study on electronic voting (Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting), and a 2005 study on computational biology (Catalyzing Inquiry at the Interface of Computing and Biology). Prior to his NRC service, he was a professional staff member and staff scientist for the House Armed Services Committee (1986-1990), where his portfolio included defense policy and arms control issues. He received his doctorate in physics from MIT.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×

Kristen R. Batch was an associate program officer for the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies through August 2008. Since joining CSTB in 2002, she worked on studies that produced Toward a Safer and More Secure Cyberspace, Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age, Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting, Signposts in Cyberspace: The Domain Name System and Internet Navigation, A Review of the FBI’s Trilogy Information Technology Modernization Program, and The Internet Under Crisis Conditions: Learning from September 11. While pursuing an M.A. in international communications from American University, she interned at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, in the Office of International Affairs, and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in the Technology and Public Policy Program. She also received a B.A. from Carnegie Mellon University in literary and cultural studies and Spanish, and she received two travel grants to conduct independent research in Spain.


Morgan Motto, program associate, was with CSTB from December 2007 until April 2009 supporting several projects. Previously, she worked with the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology (BEST). Prior to coming to the NRC, Ms. Motto worked as a project manager for international affairs and technology at the U.S. Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce. She earned a B.A. in international affairs and East Asian studies from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.


Enita Williams is an associate program officer with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies. She formerly served as a research associate for the Air Force Studies Board of the National Academies where she supported a number of projects including a standing committee for the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and a standing committee for the intelligence community (TIGER). Prior to her work at the National Academies, she served as a program assistant with the Scientific Freedom, Responsibility and Law Program of AAAS, where she drafted the human enhancement workshop report. Ms. Williams graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in public policy with a focus on science and technology policy, and an M.A. in communications.


Eric Whitaker is a senior program assistant at the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies. Prior to joining the CSTB, he was a realtor with Long and Foster Real Estate, Inc., in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Before that, he spent several years with the Public Broadcasting Service in Alexandria, Virginia, as an associate in the Corporate Support department. He has a B.A. in communication and theater arts from Hampton University.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×
Page 112
Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×
Page 113
Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×
Page 114
Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×
Page 115
Suggested Citation:"Appendix F: Biographical Information." National Research Council. 2010. Improving State Voter Registration Databases: Final Report. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12788.
×
Page 116
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Improving State Voter Registration Databases outlines several actions that are needed to help make voter registration databases capable of sharing information within state agencies and across state lines. These include short-term changes to improve education, dissemination of information, and administrative processes, and long-term changes to make improvements in data collection and entry, matching procedures, and ensure privacy and security.

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