The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project will be hosting an all-day event on October 1, 2011 at MIT entitled “Election Integrity — Past, Present, & Future.” The purpose of the event is to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the First National Symposium on Security and Reliability of Computers in the Electoral Process, which was held in Boston in 1986. As the subtitle of the event suggests, we hope to take a look back at the issues that first animated interest in the use of computers in elections a quarter of a century ago, before assessing the current state of play, and future directions. The goal is also to establish (or even continue!) dialogues across all stakeholders in the election process, including election administrators, technical professionals, and citizens.

I invite you to visit the VTP web site for more information: http://vote.caltech.edu/drupal/. Further information about the conference is in the “Featured Content” section of the home page. Click on “read more” for the agenda and the link to register.

It should be a fun day.