From Scrabble to Electronic Voting Machines

From Slashdot today :
"A New Jersey Superior Court Judge has prohibited the release of an analysis conducted on the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting system. This report arose out of a lawsuit challenging on constitutional grounds the use of these systems. The study was conducted by Andrew Appel on behalf of the plaintiffs, after the judge in the case ordered the company to permit it. That same judge has now withheld it indefinitely from the public record on a verbal order."

The name Andrew Appel looked familiar to me, and sure enough looking at his past publications I see that he is one of the authors of the paper on computer Scrabble that guided my own Scrabble game's development many years ago. (See my previous posts here). This more recent paper looks like it would be interesting to read..

I wonder how one moves from computer Scrabble to looking into the security of voting machines? Probably the Scrabble paper was the result of supervising a student's research...