Paul Edwards
President, Florida Council of the Blind; Past-President, American Council of the Blind 

Debbie Grubb
Legislative Chair and Past-President, Florida Council of the Blind

Candice Hoke
Law Professor and founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity, Cleveland State University

Dr. David Jefferson
Computer Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Dr. Mark Linderman
Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Bard College

Lawrence Norden
Project Director, Voting Technology Assessment Project, and Counsel for The Brennan Center at New York University School of Law

Ion Sancho
Supervisor of Elections,
Leon County, Florida

Dr. Barbara Simons
Computer Scientist, Member of the Board of Advisors to the U.S. Election Assictance Commission, Past President, Association for Computing Machinery

Dr. DeForest “Buster” Soaries, Jr.
Senior Pastor of the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey; Inaugural Chair, US Election Assistance Commission; former New Jersey Secretary of State; former Public Director of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York

Dr. Linda Young
Professor of Statistics, University of Florida; Fellow, American Statistical Association

Paul Edwards is President of the Florida Council of the Blind and Past-President of the American Council of the Blind. He currently directs the Access Service Department at the North Campus of Miami-Dade College which provides services for students with disabilities. He has been active in the disability rights movement for more than thirty years and has particular expertise regarding voting accessibility and voting equity.

Debbie Grubb is Legislative Chair and Past-President of the Florida Council of the Blind (FCB), a support and advocacy organization of and for Florida's citizens who are blind and visually impaired.  FCB advocacy efforts include employment, internet and all aspects of telecommunications, pedestrian and public access, transportation, and the right to cast an independent, secret and verifiable ballot.   Grubb is the Immediate Past President and current Board member of Guide Dog Users, Inc., an advocacy and support organization, the largest in the country, for guide dog users, and recently served on the Board of Directors of the American Council of the Blind (ACB).  She now serves on ACB's Environmental Access Committee.  Current Board service includes Southeastern Guide Dogs, Inc., the only guide dog school located in the Southeastern United States, VSA Arts of Florida, an affiliate of VSA Arts, a national organization seeking to make the world of the arts accessible to people with disabilities, those who are artists and those who wish to enjoy the world of the arts.   Grubb was a member of the Florida Voters' Foundation Founding Board  

Debbie has a BA Degree from Salisbury State College located in the State of Maryland and an MA Degree from the University of Virginia. 

She lives in Bradenton, FL with her husband, Frela, and retired guide dog, Magic, and also her current guide, Dena, and Frela's guide, Bonnie.  Born and raised in the State of Maryland where she taught high school English for several years and where my advocacy work had its beginning.  In recent years, Debbie has dedicated her life to advocating for and with people with disabilities to ensure that she and they can access the pathway to success and fulfillment available to everyone in this country.  Though at times frustrating, Debbie finds her work rewarding and often affords her the great joy of seeing consequences that positively impact the lives of good people who seek to find their version of the American dream.


Candice Hoke is the founding Director of the Center for Election Integrity at Cleveland State University where she is an Election Law professor with a specialty in Ohio election law and administration, in Regulatory Law and in Constitutional Federalism.  She has served as a team leader of the California TTBR Diebold Documentation Review team, a member of the investigatory Cuyahoga Election Review Panel, and Project Director of the Public Monitor of Cuyahoga Election Reform.  Under her guidance, The Center for Election Integrity received the EAC national study contract for the college poll worker recruitment and training project, and initiated the first known audit of a federal election in Ohio.  This audit of the November 2006 election in Cuyahoga County was a collaborative undertaking by the two major political parties and three election reform organizations.  The Center maintains staff specialties in technical areas (security, testing, and tabulation), election auditing, and poll worker/election official training issues.


Dr. David Jefferson is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he works on supercomputing applications.  He has also been active in research at the intersection of computing and public elections for well over a decade. 

In addition to serving on Florida Voters Advisory Board, Dr. Jefferson is a member of the boards of directors of two nonprofit, nonpartisan organizations promoting open, secure election technology, the California Voter Foundation (www.calvoter.org) and VerifiedVoting (www.verifiedvoting.org), and on the Board of Advisers of ACCURATE, A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections, (accurate-voting.org), a multi-institution voting research center funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under their CyberTrust program..

In 2007, under Secretary of State Debra Bowen, he served as chair of the Post-Election Audit Standards Working Group that worked in parallel with the Top to Bottom Review study of California voting systems (www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm).

In 2003 he was a member of the California Secretary of State's Task Force on Touchscreen Voting, whose recommendations led eventually to voter verified audit trails for electronic voting machines in California and other states.  Since then he has served as the chair of the Secretary of State's Technical Advisory Board (TAB) under Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, and then as chair of its successor, the Voting Systems Technology Assessment and Advisory Board (VSTAAB) under Secretary of State Bruce McPherson. 

In 1999 he served as chair of the technical committee of California Secretary of State Bill Jones' Task Force on Internet Voting, whose report was the first major study of the subject ever published.  He subsequently served on the National Science Foundation-Internet Policy Institute panel on Internet voting, and testified to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform organized by presidents Carter and Ford.  He has also consulted with numerous agencies and states on the subject of voting security, including the FEC and the Department of Defense.  He is coauthor of the SERVE Security Report (servesecurityreport.org), which detailed the security vulnerabilities in the Defense Department's proposed Internet voting system in 2004 and led to the cancellation of the program.

In 1995 Dr. Jefferson helped develop, in cooperation with the California Voter Foundation, the first online database of campaign finance information ever, for the San Francisco municipal election of that year.  They repeated it at the state level in 1998 for the California general election.  These efforts played a large role in convincing California, and eventually most other states, to pass laws requiring campaign finance disclosure information to be filed electronically, instead of on paper, and published on the Internet before the election.

In 1994, while at Digital Equipment Corporation, he oversaw development of the California Election Server, the first web server anywhere to provide online voter information on candidates and issues.  It set what was then a world traffic record of 1 million hits in a 24 hour period.

From 1980 to 1994 Dr. Jefferson was a computer science professor, first at USC and then at UCLA, where he conducted research in parallel computation and simulation.  He is well known for the co-invention of the Time Warp method of parallel discrete event simulation and has also published research in operating systems, evolution, and artificial life.


Dr. Mark Lindeman is an Assistant Professor of political studies at Bard College, where he teaches American Politics, especially public opinion and voting behavior.  Dr. Lindeman’s research and teaching interests include environmental politics and deliberative research into citizens’ policy preferences.  He is coauthor of Public Opinion (2nd edition, Westview Press, 2004) and has written about the 2004 U.S. presidential exit poll controversy and other concerns regarding U.S. elections.


Lawrence Norden is the Project Director for the Brennan Center’s Voting Technology Assessment Project and Counsel at the Brennan Center.  Mr. Norden works in the areas of voting systems, voting rights and government accountability.  In addition to these responsibilities, he edits and writes for the Brennan Center’s blog on New York State, ReformNY.  Mr. Norden is the lead author of The Machinery of Democracy:  Protecting Elections in an Electronic World  (Academy Chicago Press) and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties (Routledge 2007).  He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and New York University School of Law.  Before joining the Brennan Center, Mr. Norden was in private practice, concentrating in commercial litigation, technology and bankruptcy law.


Ion Sancho has been Supervisor of Elections of Leon County, Florida since he was elected to the post in 1988.  In the 2000 general election Mr. Sancho was appointed by the Florida Supreme Court as its technical advisor to the aborted recount.  He has established a national reputation supporting transparent and verifiable elections for all citizens and an end to partisan manipulation of our electoral systems for partisan gain.


Dr. Barbara Simons is a computer scientist and expert on electronic voting. She is a member of the U.S. Election Assitance Commision's Board of Advisors, appointed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. She was a member of the National Workshop on Internet Voting convened at the request of President Clinton and produced a report on Internet Voting in 2001.  She participated on the Security Peer Review Group for the US Department of Defense’s Internet voting project (SERVE) and co-authored the report that led to the cancellation of SERVE because of security concerns.  Dr. Simons co-chaired The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) study of statewide databases of registered voters.  She is co-authoring a book on voting machines with Computer Scientist Doug Jones of the University of Iowa.

Dr. Simons was President of The Association for Computing Machinery from July 1998 until June 2000.  She founded ACM’s US Public Policy Committee (USACM) in 1993 and served for many years as the Chair or co-Chair of USACM. In 2005 Simons became the first woman to receive the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from the College of Engineering of U.C. Berkeley.  She is also a Fellow of ACM and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  She received the Alumnus of the Year Award from the Berkeley Computer Science Department, the Distinguished Service Award from Computing Research Association, the Norbert Wiener Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, the Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM, and the Pioneer Award from The Electronic Frontier Foundation.  She was selected by C|NET as one of its 26 Internet “Visionaries” and by Open Computing as one of the “Top 100 Women in Computing.”  Science Magazine featured her in a special edition on women in science.  Simons is retired from IBM Research.

Reverend DeForest Blake "Buster" Soaries, Jr. is a minister, politician, author and public advocate, from Montclair, New Jersey. He was the inaugural chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission and is currently the senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey, a position he has held since November 1990.

From January 1999 to January 2002, he served as New Jersey's 30th Secretary of State making him the first African American male to serve as a Constitutional officer of the State. In February 2003, Dr. Soaries was appointed by President Bush to serve as a public director of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York.

Dr. Soaries was appointed to the United States Election Assistance Commission by President Bush in December 2003 and confirmed by the United States Senate. He was elected chairman of the Commission on January 5, 2004 at the first meeting of the four member, bi-partisan Commission. In November 2004 this Commission was the first federal agency to oversee a Presidential election. He resigned from the Commission in April 2005.

Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, Dr. Soaries resides in Monmouth Junction, New Jersey with his wife, Donna and twin sons, Malcolm and Martin.

Dr. Linda Young is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Florida where she teaches, consults, and conducts research on statistical methods for studies in public health, agricultural, environmental, and ecological settings. Dr. Young has a Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University. She has been a faculty member at Oklahoma State University, the University of Nebraska, and the University of Florida. Dr. Young has more than 100 publications in 47 different journals, constituting a mixture of statistics and subject-matter journals, and two books with a third one currently in press. A major component of her work is collaborative with researchers in the agricultural, ecological, environmental, and health sciences. Her recent research has focused on linking disparate data sets and the subsequent analysis of these data using spatial statistical methods.