Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

Third-party verifiable voting systems: addressing motivation and incentives in e-voting

Voter-verifiable voting systems place significant demands of both effort and knowledge onto ordinary voters who have only limited incentives to participate. We suggest the use of third-party verifiable voting systems, harnessing the very strong incentives for candidates and observers to verify that votes are correctly counted. A generic modification enabling this via the use of pre-filled ballots and secure depositing is outlined and we demonstrate this modification by applying it to two major voter-verifiable voting systems. Additionally, potential vulnerabilities of this approach are discussed

Analysis Of Electronic Voting Schemes In The Real World

Voting is at the heart of a country’s democracy. Assurance in the integrity of the electoral process is pivotal for voters to have any trust in the system. Often, electronic voting schemes proposed in the literature, or even implemented in real world elections do not always consider all issues that may exist in the environment in which they might be deployed. In this paper, we identify some real - world issues and threats to electronic voting schemes. We then use the threats we have identified to present an analysis of schemes recently used in Australia and Estonia and present recommendations to mitigate threats to such schemes when deployed in an untrustworthy environment

Model Checkers Are Cool: How to Model Check Voting Protocols in Uppaal

The design and implementation of an e-voting system is a challenging task. Formal analysis can be of great help here. In particular, it can lead to a better understanding of how the voting system works, and what requirements on the system are relevant. In this paper, we propose that the state-of-art model checker Uppaal provides a good environment for modelling and preliminary verification of voting protocols. To illustrate this, we present an Uppaal model of Pr\^et \`a Voter, together with some natural extensions. We also show how to verify a variant of receipt-freeness, despite the severe limitations of the property specification language in the model checker

End-to-end verifiability

This pamphlet describes end-to-end election verifiability (E2E-V) for a nontechnical audience: election officials, public policymakers, and anyone else interested in secure, transparent, evidence-based electronic elections. This work is part of the Overseas Vote Foundation's End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting: Specification and Feasibility Assessment Study (E2E VIV Project), funded by the Democracy Fund

Verifiable Classroom Voting in Practice

Classroom voting is an important pedagogical technique in which students learn by voting on the answers to questions. The same voting platform is also often used for exercises such as rating lecturer performance and voting for prizes. In this paper, we present VCV, an end-to-end (E2E) verifiable classroom voting system built based on the DRE-i protocol. Our system provides E2E verifiability without tallying authorities; it supports voting through mobile phones with constrained computing resources; it reports the tallying results instantly after voting is finished along with cryptographic proofs that enable the public to verify the tallying integrity. Since 2013, the VCV system has been used regularly in real classroom teaching, as well as academic prize competitions, in Newcastle University with positive user feedback. Our experience suggests that E2E verifiable voting through the internet and using mobile phones is feasible for daily routine activities such as classroom voting

Implementation and Evaluation of Steganography based Online Voting

Though there are online voting systems available, the authors propose a new and secure steganography based E2E (end-to-end) verifiable online voting system, to tackle the problems in voting process. This research implements a novel approach to online voting by combining visual cryptography with image steganography to enhance system security without degrading system usability and performance. The voting system will also include password hashed-based scheme and threshold decryption scheme. The software is developed on web-based Java EE with the integration of MySQL database server and Glassfish as its application server. The authors assume that the election server used and the election authorities are trustworthy. A questionnaire survey of 30 representative participants was done to collect data to measure the user acceptance of the software developed through usability testing and user acceptance testing

Themis: an On-Site Voting System with Systematic Cast-as-intended Verification and Partial Accountability

International audienceWe propose an on-site voting system Themis, that aims at improving security when local authorities are not fully trusted. Voters vote thanks to voting sheets as well as smart cards that produce encrypted ballots. Electronic ballots are systematically audited, without compromising privacy. Moreover, the system includes a precise dispute resolution procedure identifying misbehaving parties. We conduct a full formal analysis of Themis using ProVerif, with a novel approach in order to cover the modular arithmetic needed in our protocol. In order to evaluate the usability of our system, we organized a voting experiment on a (small) group of voters