Verified Voting Board Appoints New President

PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release:

March 8, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO - Verified Voting today announced the appointment of Pamela Smith as our new President. Smith has been with Verified Voting as Nationwide Coordinator for nearly three years. Ms. Smith's appointment takes effect immediately.

"For many of our supporters, Pam needs no introduction," said Verified Voting Founder David L. Dill, Stanford University Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering and principal investigator with ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). "Not only has she been a key part of our team for the past several years, she has supported our agenda with a broad range of stakeholders, from voters to election officials and more. I have no doubt that Verified Voting will continue to make a vital contribution to achieving reliable and publicly verifiable elections with Pam's leadership."

"When I first joined Verified Voting, it was as a grassroots advocate for verifiable voting systems," said Smith. "Since then I've had the good fortune to work with countless other advocates, with state and federal lawmakers, with legal and technical experts, all in the interest of improving the systems by which we cast our votes. The best part: collaborating with so many committed and talented individuals -- both inside the organization and out -- working hard every day to ensure we can have confidence in our elections. It is an honor to work with so many experts, who collectively have achieved so much. And there is much still to do to ensure that every voter knows his or her vote counts as cast."

Verified Voting board member Barbara Simons said, "I am delighted that Pam is taking over the helm at Verified Voting. We are all looking forward to working with her in this new capacity to make our voting system the most accurate, reliable, accessible, usable, and secure voting system possible."

Smith has been a small business and marketing consultant and nonprofit executive for an Hispanic educational organization working on first-language literacy and adult learning. Ms. Smith resides in Carlsbad, CA.

Verified Voting consists of VerifiedVoting.org, a non-profit advocacy organization, and the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-profit charitable organization for public education. Together, the two organizations work to achieve reliable, publicly verifiable elections by securing our voting systems to prevent electronic failures and fraud, and by identifying and advocating for best practices in election administration. Verified Voting also calls for all aspects of the voting process to be open to and observable by the public, from the testing and certification of machines through the final tabulation and canvass of the ballots.

Among its objectives, Verified Voting advocates that all voting systems provide accessible voter-verified paper records (VVPR) to enable voters to verify individual permanent records of their ballots and to provide the essential ingredient required for meaningful recounts and routine election audits. At present, Verified Voting encourages the use of precinct-count optical scan voting systems and accessible ballot-marking devices as the most practical, cost-effective and accessible means of providing those capabilities.

For more about Verified Voting Foundation, please visit http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org
For this media release, please visit http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/article.php?id=6437
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