Voter ID/Registration Conference: Speaker Bios

SPEAKER BIOS
	R. MICHAEL ALVAREZ is a professor of Political Science at California Institute of Technology. He has focused most of his research and teaching on the study of electoral politics in the United States. Professor Alvarez currently is Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, researching technological solutions to electoral problems.
	AL ATER is the Louisiana Secretary of State. He is a private businessman, a farmer and a former Louisiana Representative. He attended Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. In 1984, Ater was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives and served on the House & Governmental Affairs, Legislative Services, House Ways and Means and Agriculture Committees. In addition, Ater served as Vice Chairman of the Transportation, Highways and Public Works Committee in 1987. Four years later, he ran unopposed and was re-elected to his House of Representatives seat. In 1992 he chose not to run for reelection. In 2001, Ater joined the Department of State as First Assistant to Secretary of State Fox McKeithen. In addition to overseeing the day-to-day operations of the Secretary of State’s Office, Ater spearheaded the merger of the Department of Elections with the Department of State. Ater joined the Department of Insurance in July 2004 as Chief Deputy Commissioner. In March 2005, Ater returned to the Department of State as First Assistant Secretary of State. He became Secretary of State in July of 2005. His duties include overseeing the operations of the Department of Elections and Commercial Division, as well as fourteen state museums and the preservation of Louisiana’s historical data.
	STEPHEN ANSOLABEHERE is a Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where studies elections, democracy, and the mass media. He is coauthor (with Shanto Iyengar) of The Media Game (Macmillan, 1993) and of Going Negative: How Political Advertising Alienates and Polarizes the American Electorate (The Free Press, 1996). His articles have appeared in The American Political Science Review, The British Journal of Politics, The Journal of Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly, Public Opinion Quarterly, The Quill, and Chance. His current research projects include campaign finance, congressional elections, and party politics. Professor Ansolabehere is also a member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Project, whose first report on the reliability of voting equipment can be found here.
	KIMBALL BRACE is the president of Election Data Services Inc., a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C., that specializes in redistricting and election administration. Since founding Election Data Services in 1977, Mr. Brace has provided software, databases, and consulting services to redistricting commissions and state and local legislatures throughout the United States. As a nationally recognized expert on redistricting and the census, he has delivered speeches, conducted seminars, and testified as an expert witness in numerous court cases. He has also testified as an expert on voting equipment design, conducted studies on statewide voter registration systems for both federal and state election agencies, coordinated workshops on election administration, and participated in international election conferences. Mr. Brace testified on voting equipment in Florida’s Bush vs. Gore case in 2000. At Election Data Services, Mr. Brace has directed the development of several political information products, including nationwide databases of congressional and legislative district boundaries, election returns and voting statistics, and statistics on voting equipment usage. He was the author of the Election Assistance Commissions’ major study on their 2004 Election Day Survey. He has maintained affiliations with organizations such as the American Political Science Association and the Association of Public Data Users. In 1992 he edited The Election Data Book: A Statistical Portrait of Voting in America (Bernan Press). Prior to founding Election Data Services, he was an associate editor of the biweekly newsletter, Election Administration Reports. Mr. Brace is a graduate of American University in Washington, D.C.
	DOUG CHAPIN, Director of electionline.org, has worked on both the legal and policy aspects of election issues for more than fifteen years. Chapin’s campaign experience, as well as his experience at the Federal Election Commission and Election Data Services, Inc., equipped him with a background in election issues including redistricting, election administration, the census, and campaign finance. Before becoming electionline.org’s first Director, he worked at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, counseling clients on compliance with federal, state, and local laws regulating campaign finance, lobbying, gifts to public officials, and conflicts of interest. From 1997 to 2000, he served as elections counsel to the Democrats on the U.S. Senate Rules Committee, where he worked on election issues within the Committee’s jurisdiction, including the disputed 1996 Senate election in Louisiana. At Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky LLP, Chapin established the firm’s disclosure program under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and litigated redistricting cases in state and federal court. Chapin received a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelors in Politics from Princeton University. He is active as a volunteer coach and teacher in his hometown of Vienna, Virginia.
	PAUL S. DEGREGORIO, Chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by unanimous consent of the U.S. Senate on December 9, 2003. Mr. DeGregorio is internationally renowned in the field of elections. His areas of expertise include U.S. election administration, democracy building, and international elections. Prior to his appointment with EAC, Mr. DeGregorio served as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES). Mr. DeGregorio also served as Director of Outreach to the University of Missouri – St. Louis and worked as a technical advisor in 15 countries. From 1985 to 1993, Mr. DeGregorio served as Director of Elections for St. Louis County, Missouri’s largest jurisdiction.
	ERIC A. FISCHER is the Senior Specialist in Science and Technology at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, providing objective, nonpartisan research and analysis for Congress on issues in election reform, science policy, cybersecurity, and biotechnology. He has held this post since 1997 and previously worked at the National Academy of Sciences, the National Audubon Society, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, and the University of Washington.
	RENEÉ FONTENOT FREE is an attorney and native of Lake Charles, Louisiana. Mrs. Free received her Bachelors Degree in 1985 from McNeese State University in Social Studies Education. She received her Juris Doctorate from Southern University Law Center in 1988. She represented the 18 public colleges and universities in Louisiana as well as the Louisiana Office of Student Financial Assistance, the Louisiana Board of Regents and the Louisiana Department of Education for 14 years as an Assistant Attorney General for the Louisiana Department of Justice. In 2004 she began representing the Louisiana Department of State in elections litigation. July of that same year she was appointed as First Assistant Secretary of State. Mrs. Free currently serves as the First Assistant Secretary of State to Secretary Al Ater. Secretary Ater, Commissioner Laplace and First Assistant Free worked tirelessly to conduct some of the most successful elections in Louisiana history and under the most difficult circumstances. These elections were held in New Orleans, Louisiana in April and May of this year.
	THAD HALL is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and is affiliated with both the Center for Public Policy and Administration (CPPA) and the Institute for Public and International Affairs at the University of Utah. He teach courses in public policy and administration in the Master's of Public Administration and Master's of Public Policy programs. Thad received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. From 2000 to 2004, he worked for The Century Foundation on issues associated with election reform and the Internet.
	JONATHAN N. KATZ is currently Professor of Political Science at the California Institute of Technology. He also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Social Sciences at Caltech and is a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. His research interests focus on American politics, political methodology (statistics applied to political science), and formal political theory.
	DR. STEPHEN KENT is Vice President and Chief Scientist - Infotmation Security, for BBN Technologies, where he has led a variety of information security R&D efforts for over 25 years. Dr. Kent has played a significant role in the development of a number of Internet security standards, including PKI standards and IPsec. He has served on several information security committees for the National Research Council, and chaired the NRC committee on Authentication Technologies and Their Privacy Implications.
	ALEXANDER KEYSSAR is a Matthew W. Stirling, Jr., Professor of History and Social Policy at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.
	DEAN LOGAN is the Chief Deputy Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County, California. Mr. Logan has 18 years experience in elections and public administration. Prior to moving to Los Angeles, he was the Director of Records, Elections and Licensing Services for King County, Washington (metropolitan Seattle area). His previously served as the Director of Elections for the State of Washington and as the elected county clerk and Chief Deputy Auditor in Kitsap County, Washington. Mr. Logan is nationally recognized as a leader on election issues and is continually sought by elections officials and associations for his commitment to protecting the voting process and fostering transparent government services.
Photo by Thomas Graves	MICHAEL P. MCDONALD is an Assistant Professor in Government and Politics at George Mason University and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institute. His research interests include voting behavior, redistricting, Congress, American political development, and political methodology.
	ANNE MCGEEHAN serves as the Director of Elections for the Texas Secretary of State’s Office. The SOS Elections Division is responsible for unifying the application, operation and interpretation of all election laws in Texas; furnishing opinions and instructions to election officials; and conducting the voter registration program in the state. Ann has been a member of the SOS Elections Division since 1989. In August of 1991, she became the Director of the Elections Legal Section, and in September of 1995, she became Director of the Elections Division. Ann is a past president of the National Association of State Election Directors.
	JONATHAN NAGLER is Professor of Politics at New York University. Professor Nagler received his AB in government from Harvard University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1989. He has been a visiting associate professor at Caltech and Harvard, and has taught at the Smummer Program, European Consortium for Political Research, Essex University, England, and the Summer Program, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, University of Michigan. Professor Nagler's research focuses on voting and elections. Professor Nagler published a series of articles on multiple-candidate elections that have examined the relative importance of issues and the state of the economy to voters. This work covered voting in presidential elections in the United States as well as elections in Great Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands. He has also published a series of papers on the factors influencing voter turnout in the United States, and examining in particular the impact of different electoral laws on class-bias in the electorate. Professor Nagler's work on strategic voting in British elections (with R. Michael Alvarez) won the 1998 Durr award. Professor Nagler has also published articles on the voting behavior of Latinos and women. Professor Nagler is currently working on an examination of the voting patterns in United States elections of different economic groups during the 1980s and 1990s. This work tries to address the paradox of the success of Republican presidential candidates among lower-middle class voters at a time when many of those voters were not seeing economic gains.
	SPENCER OVERTONis a professor at The George Washington University Law School, and he specializes in voting rights and campaign finance law. Professor Overton's academic articles on election law have appeared in several leading law journals, and his forthcoming article "Voter Identification," will be published in the University of Michigan law Review. Overton's book, "Stealing Democracy: The New Politics of Voter Suppression," was published and released by W.W. Norton in June 2006. Professor Overton formerly taught at the University of California, Davis and served as the Charles Hamilton Houston Fellow at Harvard Law School. He was also a commissioner on the Jimmy Carter-James Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform, and Overton currently serves on the boards of Common Cause, Demos, and the Center for Responsive Politics.
	RONALD L. RIVEST the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a member of the lab's Theory of Computation Group and a founder of its Cryptography and Information Security Group. He is also a founder of RSA Data Security (now merged with Security Dynamics to form RSA Security) and of Peppercoin and is a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Professor Rivest has research interests in cryptography, computer and network security, electronic voting, and algorithms.
	MARC ROTENBERG is Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC. He teaches information privacy law at Georgetown University Law Center and has testified before Congress on many issues, including access to information, encryption policy, consumer protection, computer security, and communications privacy. He testified before the 9-11 Commission on "Security and Liberty: Protecting Privacy, Preventing Terrorism." He has served on several national and international advisory panels, including the expert panels on Cryptography Policy and Computer Security for the OECD, the Legal Experts on Cyberspace Law for UNESCO, and the Countering Spam program of the ITU. He currently chairs the ABA Committee on Privacy and Information Protection. He is the former Chair of the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG domain. He is editor of The Privacy Law Sourcebook and co-editor (with Daniel J. Solove) of Information Privacy Law (Aspen Publishing 2005). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Law School. He served as Counsel to Senator Patrick J. Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee after graduation from law school. He is the recipient of several awards including the World Technology Award in Law.
	TED SELKER is an Associate Professor at the MIT Media and Arts Technology Laboratory and the Director of the Context Aware Computing Lab. He is also Co-Director of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project. His principal field of interest includes developing technology to understand and respect human intention.
	MICHELLE SHAFER currently serves as Vice President, Communications & External Affairs at Oakland, California based Sequoia Voting Systems where she directs the company’s public relations, government affairs, customer relations, marketing, crisis management and external communications strategies. Additionally, she serves as Vice Chair of the Election Technology Council (ETC), the election industry trade association under the umbrella of the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA). Ms. Shafer has over 17 years of professional experience in the areas of public relations, marketing communications, branding, competitive landscape analysis, crisis management, events planning, advertising and technology sales promotion, with a decade of experience specifically in the election technology industry.
	RICHARD G. SMOLKA is editor and publisher of Election Administration Reports, the biweekly newsletter for election officials he founded in 1971. He is Professor Emeritus at the School of Public Affairs of American University in Washington D.C where he was a full-time faculty member for 31 years. Professor Smolka founded the Institute for Election Administration at American University in 1972. Professor Smolka has participated in assisting elections in developing democracies in pre-election preparation, election observation, analysis of voting procedures, and in conferences of election officials in 28 countries on six continents, among them Russia, Bulgaria, Thailand, Palestine, India, Nepal and Venezuela. He served as a mobile poll official in the outback of South Australia and assisted in the vote count in the 1997 parliamentary election in South Somerset, United Kingdom. More...
	DANIEL TOKAJI is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law and the Associate Director of Election Law at Moritz. His areas of expertise include voting rights and election administration, and he is the author of the "Equal Vote" blog which covers developments in these areas. He is also a practicing civil rights lawyer and, before arriving at Moritz, was a staff attorney with the ACLU of Southern California and the Chair of California Common Cause.
	ROSS UNDERWOOD is the General Manager Voter Registration and ExpressPoll at Diebold Eelction Systems. The Voter Registration Division manages voter registration software running in more than 50 jurisdictions managing over 25 million voter rows, issuing more than 10 million absent voter ballots each election. The ExpressPoll Division manages the deployment of electronic poll books in 11 states. Two of these states (Georgia and Maryland) are full statewide implementations of the ExpressPoll units in every precinct in the state. Mr. Underwood previously developed data exchange systems for California Voter, Statewide Duplicate, Felon, National Change of Address, National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (Motor Voter), Department of Motor Vehicle, Data Exchange Systems, and was Lead Developer on DIMS-NeT.
	TOVA ANDREA WANG is Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation. She is a nationally recognized expert on election reform and was the Executive Director of The Century Foundation's Post-2004 Election Reform Working Group, comprised of many of the most preeminent election law scholars in the country. In 2001, she was staff person to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former Presidents Carter and Ford, of which The Century Foundation was a co-sponsor. She is the author of several election reform reports, and her commentary on this subject has appeared in the Washington Post, The Hill, national Associated Press reports, the Nation, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the New York Daily News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the American Prospect, Campaigns and Elections and MSNBC.com, among other media outlets.