Welcome to another installment of Chair's Corner. Our department chair will use this personal message forum for a variety of purposes: important information, inspiration, and a little bit of fun.
Computers are used everywhere in modern society: finance, medicine, critical infrastructure, transportation. Because of those critical roles, we as computing professionals have a responsibility to work carefully to create the safest, most reliable systems possible. One area in which this is true is election systems. We use computers throughout our election process: voting machines, tabulation, voter records. Computing specialists have worked hard over to make our voting systems more secure and, along the way, to help the citizenry to understand the issues. A key example is the creation of paper trails for voting machines. This approach has been pushed by computer scientists over the past 15 years as a safeguard against tampering. We should be proud of these efforts by our colleagues. We should use them as an example to guide our own work.