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The authors discuss electronic voting in the U.S., describe tests of Internet voting programs, and argue that Internet voting is not achievable as of 2012 for security reasons. According to the authors, electronic voting does not necessarily increase voter turnout and is susceptible to bribery and malicious computer software. The subversion of a June 2012 District of Columbia mock election, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) that was intended to enable absentee citizens from the U.S. military to vote electronically, and the Zeus computer virus are mentioned. Topics include voting law and legislation regarding secret ballots and vote buying, Internet and electronic commerce security, and absentee voting are discussed. INSET: Internet Voting and E-Commerce Compared.

Among the fastest priority queue implementations, skew heaps have properties that make them particularly suited to concurrent manipulation of shared queues. A concurrent version of the top down implementation of skew heaps can be produced from previously published sequential versions using almost mechanical transformations. This implementation requires O (log n) time to en queue or dequeue an item, but it allows new operations to begin after only O (1) time on a MIMD machine. Thus, there is potential for significant concurrency when multiple processes share a queue. Applications to problems in graph theory and simulation are discussed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides information on the splay-prefix algorithm, one of the simplest and fastest adaptive data compression algorithms based on the use of a prefix code. Application of data structures to arithmetic data compression and encryption and image processing; Use of a source text as input and production of a corresponding compressed text; Need for the compressed text to use codes that obey the prefix property.

Compares the priority-queue and event-set implementations in computer science. Development of priority-queue for representing the pending event set; Details on the basic operations of the priority-queue abstract data type; Methodology for measuring the priority-queue implementation.

Presents a solution to the problem of moving and sharing data in a program that span several files. Inclusion of file names as data in files as the primary factor that leads to difficulties in data moving; Use of a syntactic distinction between absolute and relative file names in solving the problems of several-filed data; Difference between absolute file naming in the UNIX system and other similar progams.

acm forum Don't Sell Technology Short Alan Borning's treatise, 'computer System Relibaility and Nuclear War' (Communications, February 1987, pp. 112-31), is a remarkably thorough and perceptive piece of work. Its […]

A letter to the editor is presented in response to the article "Taking Computer Literacy Literally," by Carolynn Van Dyke in the May 1987 issue.

Technical Correspondence MIN-MAX HEAPS AND GENERALIZED PRIORITY QUEUES I enjoyed reading the article on min-max heaps by Atkinson, Sack, Santoro, and Strothotte (Commun. ACM 29, 10 (Oct. 1986), 996-1000). It […]