{"id":18521,"date":"2026-04-22T17:55:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:55:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/?p=18521"},"modified":"2026-04-22T17:58:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T21:58:34","slug":"talk-260424-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/talk-260424-1\/","title":{"rendered":"[Talk] Suzanne Mello-Stark: Election Security After 2020: Systems Held, Trust Didn\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>When: Friday, April 24, 3:30 PM<br>Where: Beaupre 105<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Abstract<\/strong>:<br>This talk argues that the biggest threat to elections today is not hacking, but doubt. Since 2020, election systems have become more secure. Paper ballots, risk-limiting audits, and improved coordination have made large-scale tampering with votes extremely difficult. But while the systems held, confidence in them did not. The threat model has shifted from attacking infrastructure to shaping perception, using disinformation, social media, and increasingly AI-generated content to undermine trust in legitimate outcomes. This creates a fundamental challenge: how do you secure a system when the attack surface includes human belief? This talk reframes election security as a socio-technical problem and challenges us to think beyond code and cryptography, because a system can be technically secure and still fail if people no longer trust it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Suzanne Mello-Stark Ph.D. is a Professor of Computer Science at Rhode Island College.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Sharing the session will be Ed Lamagna delivering <a href=\"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/talk-260424-0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">A Personal Retrospective on 50 Years of Computer Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When: Friday, April 24, 3:30 PMWhere: Beaupre 105 Abstract:This talk argues that the biggest threat to elections today is not hacking, but doubt. Since 2020, election systems have become more secure. Paper ballots, risk-limiting audits, and improved coordination have made large-scale tampering with votes extremely difficult. But while the systems held, confidence in them did [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3300,"featured_media":18526,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[34,85],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-seminars"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3300"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18521"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18527,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18521\/revisions\/18527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}