Yesterday I posted my first entry at Wikipedia on Brian J. Williams, a presumed expert on electronic voting technologies.
I’m posting the first cut here with its links to external resources embedded. Hopefully anyone who knows more about him will comment here or update the Wiki entry.
First draft
Britain J. Williams is Professor Emeritus – Director, Center For Election Systems at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. He serves as a consultant to the states of Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where he has certified electronic voting systems.
He wrote a defense of the Georgia electronic voting system (pdf) in response to criticism of Diebold systems levied by Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting. Harris penned a rebuttal.
The Williams defense of Georgia procedures provides the only biographical information about him available on the Net:
He was a consultant to the FEC during the development of the FEC Voting System Standards in 1990 and again in 2002.He is currently a member of the NASED Voting Systems Board and Chair of the NASED Voting Systems Board Technical Committee. He has been conducting certification evaluations of computer-based voting systems for the State of Georgia since 1986. He also assists the states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia with certification evaluations of computer-based voting systems.
NASED is the National Association of Election Directors; these are high level government employees. NASED is not an association of computing professionals.
Kennesaw State University began life as a junior college in 1963; became a 4-year college in 1980; and became a university in 1996; it is not an established research institution in computer security.
Williams does not appear as an author of any paper – technical or otherwise – in a search of ACM, the first society in computing, nor has he ever participated in the 23-year old ACM public forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems. In contrast, Peter G. Neumann, moderator of that forum, published Security Criteria for Electronic Voting in 1993 at the 16th National Computer Security Conference.
Williams reportedly has held a key position at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
