MEDIA ADVISORY

Event: Michael I. Shamos, principal systems scientist and co-director of Carnegie Mellon Universitys Institute for eCommerce in the School of Computer Science, has been an examiner of computerized voting systems for Pennsylvania and Texas since 1980. He has studied over 100 different voting products, including the ones just used in Florida.

Shamos will talk about what computers do and do not do in the American voting process. He will explain how computers are used in voting in the United States, why the process is not simple, why recounts, even in punched-card elections, can take weeks and why, when a deck of ballots are counted, the totals are never the same twice in a row.

In addition, he will discuss voting fraud, vote-buying, ballot stuffing, the difference between precinct count and central count systems and what happens to ballots between the time they are cast and when they are counted.

Shamos widely cited paper on voting system examination, written in 1993, is available on the Web at: http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/cfp93/shamos.html

WHEN: 4:30 p.m., Wed. November 15, 2000

WHERE: 7500 Wean Hall on the Carnegie Mellon campus.