DAVID JEFFERSON has been conducting research at the intersection of computers, the Internet, and public elections for over a decade.  He was recently appointed Chair of the California Secretary of State's Technical Oversight Committee, to provide technical advice on the security and reliability of voting systems.  In early 2004 was coauthor with Avi Rubin, Barbara Simons and David Wagner of "A Security Analysis of the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE)" (http://www.servesecurityreport.org), which was a strong critique of the Internet voting system proposed by the Department of Defense. The report led to cancellation of the use of SERVE in the 2004 elections. Earlier, in the spring of 2003 he was a member of the California Secretary of State's Task Force on Touchscreen Voting, whose report eventually led to the requirement for a voter-verified paper trail in California.

Between 1999 and 2001 he served as chair of the technical committee of the California Secretary of State's Task Force on Internet Voting, whose report was the first major study of Internet voting ever published.  He went on to serve that year on the National Science Foundation-Internet Policy Institute panel on Internet voting, and testified to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform organized by presidents Carter and Ford.  He has also consulted with numerous agencies and states on the subject of voting security, including the FEC and the Department of Defense.

In 1994, while working at Digital Equipment Corporation, he oversaw development of the California Election Server, the first Web server anywhere to provide voter information on candidates and issues, and also live election returns, setting what was then a world traffic record of one million hits in a 24 hour period.  In 1995 he and Kim Alexander developed the first online database of campaign finance information for the San Francisco municipal election that year, and repeated it in 1998 for the California general election.  These efforts played a large role in convincing California, and eventually most other states, to pass laws requiring campaign finance disclosure data to be filed electronically instead of on paper, and to be published on the Web.

Dr. Jefferson is a long-time member and past chair of the board of directors of the California Voter Foundation.

In his day job Dr. Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he does research in scalable parallel operating systems and simulation.  Before that he conducted research in the laboratories of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq.  From 1980 to 1994 he was a computer science professor, first at USC and then at UCLA, where he did research in parallel computation and simulation.  He is well known for the co-invention of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation.  He has also published research in operating systems, evolution, and artificial life.  He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, and a B.S. in mathematics from Yale University.