Barbara Simons

Former president of the Association for Computing Machinery

• Born: January 26, 1941
• Place of Birth: Boston, MA

Primary Company/Organization: Association for Computing Machinery

Introduction

Barbara Simons is an expert on voting technology and has served as an expert adviser to the U.S. president, the U.S. military, and other organizations regarding the security of different methods of voting. She served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and is involved with efforts to get more women and members of underrepresented minority groups involved in computer science.

Early Life

Barbara Simons earned her doctorate in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley; her doctoral dissertation solved a significant problem in scheduling theory.

Life's Work

Simons's early professional life was spent addressing technical issues in computing. After earning her doctorate, she began working at IBM in 1980, at the company's San Jose Research Center as a research staff member. She became a senior programmer at IBM's Applications Development Technology Institute. She later served as a senior technology adviser for IBM Global Services until her retirement from the company in 1998. Her career at IBM was devoted primarily to research on scheduling theory, algorithm analysis and design, and compiler optimization. Her expertise in technical computing was recognized by her designation as an ACM Fellow and her election to the presidency of that organization. She is perhaps best known nationally as an expert on voting technology and security issues involved with electronic voting systems and Internet voting.

Simons has testified before the U.S. Congress, the California legislature, and various government agencies on technology-related issues, and he has written or coauthored reports on technological issues, including Internet and other types of electronic voting. She served as a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting in 2001 and on the Security Peer Review Group, which evaluated the Department of Defense's proposal to allow overseas U.S. voters to vote via the Internet; the conclusion of the report from this committee, coauthored by Simons, was that Internet voting still had too many security flaws to be advisable.

In 2006, Simons and coauthors David Dill and Douglas W. Jones produced a widely publicized report cataloging the many security flaws in touch-screen voting machines manufactured by Diebold, as well as the fact that Diebold was aware of these flaws and chose not to solve them. Simons has also criticized the computerized database of registered voters that each state was required to create under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, pointing out that although the databases were meant to prevent voting by those not eligible and safeguard the rights of those who were eligible, they could have the opposite effect: If the databases were not secure and not properly monitored, it would be easy for an unscrupulous person to add the names of ineligible voters or remove the names of eligible voters. Simons has published many other articles and given lectures on the state of security for electronic voting, a particularly timely issue because many local governments in the United States had recently purchased electronic voting machines, sometimes with federal assistance, in response to the 2002 Help America Vote Act and the “hanging chad” and “butterfly ballot” controversies in the presidential election of 2000. As Simons and her coauthors pointed out, such machines made it easy for election results to be manipulated, and because no record of the vote existed other than that registered electronically, it would not be possible to hold a recount or otherwise audit the election (both possibilities in elections in which paper ballots are used). In 2012, Simons and Douglas W. Jones published Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?, a book-length study of voting technology written to be accessible to the general public and with particular focus on current issues in electronic voting in the United States. Simmons sits on the board of directors of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting accuracy, transparency and verifiability of elections. She has also coauthored The Future of Voting: End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting, the July 2015 US Vote Foundation report.

Simons has received many awards and other honors for her work. In 1992, she was given the Norbert Wiener Award for Professional and Social Responsibility and was featured in a special edition of Science magazine focused on women in science. In 1993, she became a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2005, she received the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley; she was the first woman to receive this honor. She is also involved in efforts to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities working in computer science; her efforts in this regard include serving on the boards of the Coalition to Diversify Computing and the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, and she was a cofounder of the Reentry Program for Women and Minorities in the University of California, Berkeley's computer science department. Simons is also a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and serves on the Electorate Nominating Committee for the Information, Computing, and Communication Section.

After the 2016 presidential election, Simons noticed that more of her friends and acquaintances were expressing concerns about electronic voting. In a March 2018 interview for Berkeley Engineering, she said, "Fortunately, we know what needs to be done to protect voting systems from attack, namely paper ballots and manual post-election ballot audits to check the computerized machines that count the ballots. Regrettably, the states and the federal government are not treating the threat with the urgency it requires."

Personal Life

Simons is retired from IBM and acts as an expert adviser and guest speaker on issues related to voting machinery and the security hazards posed by electronic voting technologies. She is divorced from James Harris Simons, a hedge fund manager, mathematician, and philanthropist. Their son, Paul, was struck by a car and killed in 1996 while riding a bike near his father's Long Island, New York, home.

Bibliography

Hall, Thad E., R. Michael Alvarez, and Lonna Rae Atkeson, eds. Confirming Elections: Creating Confidence and Integrity through Election Auditing. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

Herrnson, Paul S., Richard G. Niemi, Michael J. Hammer, Benjamin B. Bederson, Frederick C. Conrad, and Michael W. Traugott. Voting Technology: The Not-so-Simple Act of Counting a Ballot. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2008. Print.

Jefferson, David, Aviel D. Rubin, Barbara Simons, and David Wagner. “Analyzing Internet Voting Securing: An Extensive Assessment of a Proposed Internet-Based Voting System.” Communications of the ACM 47.10 (2004): 59–64. Print.

Jones, Douglas W., and Barbara Simons. Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? Stanford: Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2012. Print.

Simons, Barbara. "Q&A with Barbara Simons." Interview by Berkeley Engineering. Berkeley Engineering, 16 Mar. 2018, engineering.berkeley.edu/2018/03/qa-barbara-simons. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019.

Schwartz, John. “The 2004 Campaign: Voting: Online Ballots Canceled for Americans Overseas.” New York Times 6 Feb. 2004: 18. Print.