How does one become an Expert?

Yesterday, someone at work pointed out this travesty to me. On the one hand, I applaud their desire to scratch their itch. Even in public. Scratching in public is apparently important for baseball players and voting activists. The content of their posts has a little too much of the breathless, cross-eyed, oh-my-isn't-this-exciting flavor to it for my taste, but then I think that salsa tastes good on french fries.

No, the thing about it that bugs me is that it is a group of ten dudes, most of which are computer scientists (like myself), no two of which have the same depth nor breadth of experience in working with voting machinery or election systems as I have.

Maybe no three.

Let's do a quick poll. How many here have served as lead architect and senior programmer on the construction of DRE software which was NASED certified? How many here have served as lead architect and senior programmer on a system to allow overseas servicemen to vote with the same level of confidence (or probably higher) that their votes were successfully delivered and counted as people who vote at a poll site? How many here can speak intelligently about CESG's voting methodology? How many here reasonably understand the statistical analysis of election confidence given a Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail? How many here can reasonably explain to a lay person how Chaum's or Neff's voter verifiable crypto systems work to protect both the privacy and the integrity of a vote?

Me. Maybe someone else, but I rather doubt that there are too many.

Avi Rubin was interviewed for November's Dr. Dobb's Journal. Right on the cover, he is called " the world's leading authority on electronic voting and software engineering." Wow. He must've done some pretty impressive work to qualify for such a description. What does google say about "avi rubin software engineering"? A little bit of stuff, like building a firewall to stop java applets. Kind of security related, even. A lot of stuff about how Rubin is an e-voting expert. But that's not really relevant, since it's just sort of tautaulogical. How about "avi rubin voting machine"? H'm, this is more promising. The very first hit is to his very own web site, where he discusses in some depth his apparently first experience as an election judge. There are no dates given on this page, but it appears to post-date the Analysis of an Electronic Voting System which appears to have been published in May of 2003 (the date at the top of the page notwithstanding). As far as I can tell, this is the earliest example of Avi doing anything with respect to voting systems.

So far, I don't understand how he came to be the worldwide leader.

I, in comparison, have been working full time since the January 2000 not on criticizing the efforts of others, but on finding and building workable solutions to the problem of how to run an election in the twenty-first century.