Beyond the Hype: A Research Driven Look at Claims About New Voting Technology

Please join us on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 at 11:00 am Pacific for “Beyond the Hype: A Research Driven Look at Claims About New Voting Technology” - the next episode of Election Science Office Hours, a webinar series moderated by R. Michael Alvarez, PhD, Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech and Co-Director, Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP).

Professor Alvarez’s guest for this episode will be Michael Specter, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Cybersecurity & Privacy at Georgia Tech. Professor Spector will be joined by Delaney Gomen, a PhD Student in Computer Science at Georgia Tech who conducts research on his team. The group will have a conversation about issues and opportunities in usability research and mobile voting. They will discuss how to potentially resolve challenges and what can be learned from the Anchorage experience and other research.

Professor Specter’s research focuses on systems security and applied cryptography, particularly in areas relevant to public policy. Topics of interest include surveillance, cryptographic accountability, content moderation, misinformation, and elections security. He joined Georgia Tech in 2023 from Google, where he was a research scientist studying android security and privacy. He earned his PhD in EECS from MIT in 2021, where he was a member of the Internet Policy Research Initiative and the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Register in advance for this meeting: https://caltech.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_47zI0zKGQba6jKSz0xOyUg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

For more information, please contact Sabrina Hameister by phone at 626-395-4228 or by email at sboschet@caltech.edu.