Rebecca Mercuri

In the early 1990s Mercuri described what became known as the Mercuri method: the voting machine prints the voter's choices behind glass, the voter confirms them, and the paper becomes the ballot of record. The machine's tally is merely a fast first guess. It inverted the industry's assumption that the software was the truth and paper an unnecessary expense.

She finished her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000, on checks and balances in electronic vote tabulation, the same autumn Florida was squinting at punch cards with magnifying glasses. Her expert affidavit in the Bush v. Gore litigation made her one of the most quoted voices in the debate that followed. Two decades later, most US states have adopted exactly the paper trail she asked for.