June 11, 2003

Speaker Biographies

John Fund is on leave as an editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal, where he began his career as deputy editorial features editor. He is currently finishing a book on voter fraud and the sloppiness of our current election systems. He is also an on-air contributor to MSNBC and CNBC. Mr. Fund is a former staffer for the California State Legislature and coauthor of two books, Cleaning House: America’s Campaign for Term Limits and Regulation through Litigation.

Dan Keating is a database editor at the Washington Post, where he analyzes information for stories and projects. He was part of the Miami Herald team that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1999 for exposing vote fraud and part of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer for investigative reporting in 1998 for revealing illegal police overtime. More recently he has written about Ford Explorers, Florida ballots, the 2000 Census, the impact of poverty concentration on student performance, electronic voting, and government spending in the District of Columbia. He worked four years at the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, before going to the Herald in 1988. Mr. Keating spent four years in the Key West Bureau, where he covered environmental issues, treasure salvors, boaters, Cuban rafters, and local crime and politics. He traveled to Cuba by boat in 1992 to report on foreign tourists, as well as endangered Cuban crocodiles in the Zapata Swamp. He then specialized in doing computer analysis for the Herald in Broward and then Miami-Dade, with stories that focused on illegal construction blasting, the Sawgrass Expressway, police crashes, the sexual predator registry, and city inspectors taking bribes.

Mark Seibel has been the managing editor responsible for international and national security coverage in the Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder Newspapers since September 2003. He was the managing editor of the Miami Herald, a Knight Ridder newspaper and simultaneously directed the Miami Herald/USAToday recount of disputed Florida ballots. Mr. Seibel held a variety of positions at the Herald—foreign editor, director of international operations, editor of its International Edition, assistant managing editor for Page One, and assistant managing editor for local and state news. He has also been an editor or reporter at the Dallas Morning News, the Dallas Times Herald, the San Jose Mercury, and the Los Angeles Times and was a Neiman Foundation Fellow at Harvard University. While at the Herald, Mr. Seibel directed reporting teams that won two Pulitzer Prizes, the first for coverage of the Iran-contra affair in 1987 and the second for coverage of the Elian Gonzalez episode in 2000.

John R. Lott Jr. is a resident scholar at AEI. Mr. Lott has held positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice and was the chief economist at the United States Sentencing Commission during 1988 and 1989. Mr. Lott has published over ninety articles in academic journals. He is the author of The Bias against Guns. Previously, he has written More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws and more recently, a book on antitrust policy titled Are Predatory Commitments Credible?: Who Should the Courts Believe?. Opinion pieces by Mr. Lott have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.

Philip Klinkner is the James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. He is the primary author (with Rogers Smith) of The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of America’s Commitment to Racial Equality (University of Chicago Press, September 1999), which examines the dynamics of race in American politics and history. The book received the inaugural Horace Mann Bond Book Award from the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University and was a semifinalist for the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. Mr. Klinkner has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon.com, the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and many other newspapers and magazines. He has also appeared on many television and radio broadcasts, including C-SPAN, NPR, and Black Entertainment Television. He was a Research Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. in 1990-91 and a Guest Scholar in 1993 and 1995.

Ilya Somin is an assistant professor at George Mason University School of Law. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation and its implications for constitutional democracy. Mr. Somin previously served as the John M. Olin Fellow in Law at Northwestern University Law School in 2002–2003. In 2001–2002, he clerked for the Hon. Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

James C. Garand is the Emogene Pliner Distinguished Professor in Political Science and has teaching and research interests in the fields of legislative politics, electoral politics, public policy, state politics, bureaucratic politics, the American presidency, domestic political economy, and methodology and statistics. His research on a wide range of topics in American politics has been published in numerous journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Western Political Quarterly, Public Choice, Social Science Quarterly, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. His coedited book, Before the Vote: Forecasting American National Elections, was published by Sage Publications in 2000. Mr. Garand is currently serving as the president of the Southern Political Science Association where he also serves on the Executive Council. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Politics Research, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and Journal of Political Marketing.

J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio secretary of state, has served as mayor of Cincinnati, under secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. In 1994, he became the first African-American elected to a statewide executive office, Ohio treasurer of state. Mr. Blackwell, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, is a certified government finance manager. In 1999, he received the Government Finance Officers Association’s Excellence in Government Award. In 2002, he was recognized by Government Technology Magazine as one of the top twenty-five public sector leaders in information technology.

Michael Shamos is a Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he serves as codirector of the Institute for eCommerce, teaching courses in eCommerce technology, electronic payment systems, and eCommerce law and regulation. From 1980 to 2000 he was statutory examiner of computerized voting systems for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and from 1987 to 2000 he worked on electronic voting certification for the State of Texas. During that time he participated in every electronic voting examination conducted in those two states, involving over 100 different voting systems accounting for more than 11 percent of the popular vote of the United States in the 2000 election. Mr. Shamos has been an expert witness in two recent lawsuits involving electronic voting: Wexler v. Lepore in Florida and Benavidez v. Shelley in California. In 1993 he authored "Electronic Voting– Evaluating the Threat" and in 2004 "Paper v. Electronic Voting Records–An Assessment," both of which were presented at the ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy.

Adam Cohen is a member of the New York Times Editorial Board, where he writes primarily about legal issues. This year, he has been writing a year-long editorial series, "Making Votes Count," examining electronic voting machines, voting roll purges, voter identification requirements, and other aspects of the mechanics of American democracy. He is the author of The Perfect Store: Inside eBay and coauthor of American Pharaoh: Richard J. Daley: His Battle for Chicago and the Nation. Before joining the Times, he was a senior writer for Time magazine and a lawyer.

Stephen Ansolabehere is the Elting R. Morison Professor of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studies elections, democracy, and the mass media. Mr. Ansolabehere is a member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, which he directed from its inception to the beginning of this year. His research focuses on elections and representation, including two books, The Media Game and Going Negative, and numerous articles in political science, economics, law, and statistics journals.

R. Doug Lewis is the executive director of The Election Center, a national nonprofit organization serving the elections and voter registration profession. He developed and authored the Professional Education Program for elections/registration officials, the most extensive professional training program in the world for elections officials. During the aftermath of Election 2000, Mr. Lewis appeared on CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC (including the Today Show), and was a regular on C-SPAN, representing the nation’s election administrators. He established the National Task Force on Election Reform to study and propose solutions to the problems of the 2000 Presidential election, which was a national commission comprised of thirty eight of the nation’s top elections administrators in 2001.

Thomas A. Husted is the associate dean for academic affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of economics at American University in Washington, D.C. His research interests include applied public economics and public choice. He served as a senior program officer and senior consultant to the National Research Council’s Committee on Education Finance.

Ray Martinez is a commissioner for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC was charged with providing guidance to state and local jurisdictions on various election reform requirements and to oversee the distribution of federal funds to improve the administration of federal elections. Before his appointed to the EAC, Mr. Martinez was a practicing attorney in Austin and served as executive director and legal counsel of the Every Texan Foundation, a non-partisan voter registration and education effort dedicated to increasing voter participation in Texas. Mr. Martinez served as deputy assistant to the president for intergovernmental affairs under President Clinton. Previously he served as regional director for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Dallas.

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