I'm proud of my six years of service as IACR Secretary and two years of service as General Chair of Crypto 2006. I'm delighted to have reduced Crypto 2006 registration fees by more than 15% with, I believe, no degradation of the quality of the event — and to have still returned a large surplus to the IACR. After years of debate about anonymous submissions, I take special pride in having proposed and authored the 2006 ballot resolution which gave the membership an opportunity to vote and finally put the matter to rest.
Members of the Board of Directors must listen carefully to and act upon the needs of the membership — both short and long term. The role of the IACR has grown substantially in recent years — adding workshops, electronic payments, and improved data management. Now is a good time to step back and assess where we want the organization to be 5-10 years hence. Do we want to move towards electronic publishing, and if so how? Are more sponsored workshops or a different conference/workshop management structure desirable? Should we replace our current paper-based election system with an on-line system? These are just a few of the many questions that we face that do not have easy answers.
The Board election process is one which, if elected, I am committed to working to advance beyond the century-old technology we are currently using. I have served on the IACR Election Committee several times and know its frailties well. The mailed paper ballots are slow and expensive. We routinely violate the deadlines in the IACR Bylaws because of delivery delays. The response rate is very low, and completed ballots are often not received or received too late to be counted. Many received ballots have to be disqualified because of procedural errors. WE CAN DO BETTER!
Our community has developed cryptographic protocols which enable truly-verifiable secret-ballot elections. Voters can check to see that their votes are properly included and that all votes are properly counted — all while maintaining the privacy of votes. In a special demonstration session at Crypto 2008, eight designs for web-based voting systems were presented — several of which are fully implemented and could be rapidly deployed. The time is right to make this happen.