Pretty Good Strategies for Benaloh Challenge

Benaloh challenge allows the voter to audit the encryption of her vote, and in particular to check whether the vote has been represented correctly. An interesting analysis of the mechanism has been presented by Culnane and Teague. The authors propose a natural game-theoretic model of the interaction between the voter and a corrupt, malicious encryption device. Then, they claim that there is no "natural" rational strategy for the voter to play the game. In consequence, the authorities cannot provide the voter with a sensible auditing strategy, which undermines the whole idea. Here, we claim the contrary, i.e., that there exist simple rational strategies that justify the usefulness of Benaloh challenge

Election Security Is Harder Than You Think

Recent years have seen the rise of nation-state interference in elections across the globe, making the ever-present need for more secure elections all the more dire. While certain common-sense approaches have been a typical response in the past, e.g. ``don't connect voting machines to the Internet'' and ``use a voting system with a paper trail'', known-good solutions to improving election security have languished in relative obscurity for decades. These techniques are only now finally being implemented at scale, and that implementation has brought the intricacies of sophisticated approaches to election security into full relief. This dissertation argues that while approaches to improve election security like paper ballots and post-election audits seem straightforward, in reality there are significant practical barriers to sufficient implementation. Overcoming these barriers is a necessary condition for an election to be secure, and while doing so is possible, it requires significant refinement of existing techniques. In order to better understand how election security technology can be improved, I first develop what it means for an election to be secure. I then delve into experimental results regarding voter-verified paper, discussing the challenges presented by paper ballots as well as some strategies to improve the security they can deliver. I examine the post-election audit ecosystem and propose a manifest improvement to audit workload analysis through parallelization. Finally, I show that even when all of these conditions are met (as in a vote-by-mail scenario), there are still wrinkles that must be addressed for an election to be truly secure.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163272/1/matber_1.pd

Civil Society, Public Action and Accountability in Africa

This paper examines the potential role of civil society action in increasing state accountability for development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It further develops the analytical framework of the World Development Report 2004 on accountability relationships, to emphasize the underlying political economy drivers of accountability and implications for how civil society is constituted and functions. It argues on this basis that the most important domain for improving accountability is through the political relations between citizens, civil society, and state leadership. The evidence broadly suggests that when higher-level political leadership provides sufficient or appropriate powers for citizen participation in holding within-state agencies or frontline providers accountable, there is frequently positive impact on outcomes. However, the big question remaining for such types of interventions is how to improve the incentives of higher-level leadership to pursue appropriate policy design and implementation. The paper argues that there is substantial scope for greater efforts in this domain, including through the support of external aid agencies. Such efforts and support should, however, build on existing political and civil society structures (rather than transplanting "best practice" initiatives from elsewhere), and be structured for careful monitoring and assessment of impact.

Civil society, public action and accountability in Africa

This paper examines the potential role of civil society action in increasing state accountability for development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It further develops the analytical framework of the World Development Report 2004 on accountability relationships, to emphasize the underlying political economy drivers of accountability and implications for how civil society is constituted and functions. It argues on this basis that the most important domain for improving accountability is through the political relations between citizens, civil society, and state leadership. The evidence broadly suggests that when higher-level political leadership provides sufficient or appropriate powers for citizen participation in holding within-state agencies or frontline providers accountable, there is frequently positive impact on outcomes. However, the big question remaining for such types of interventions is how to improve the incentives of higher-level leadership to pursue appropriate policy design and implementation. The paper argues that there is substantial scope for greater efforts in this domain, including through the support of external aid agencies. Such efforts and support should, however, build on existing political and civil society structures (rather than transplanting"best practice"” initiatives from elsewhere), and be structured for careful monitoring and assessment of impact.Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures,Parliamentary Government,Social Accountability,Civil Society,ICT Policy and Strategies

Intergovernmental Challenges and Achievements, Biennial Report of TACIR FY 2007 and FY 2008

https://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/govpubs-tn-advisory-commission-intergovernmental-relations-biennial-report/1006/thumbnail.jp

Public Campaign Financing in Albuquerque: Citizens Win With Clean Money Elections

Describes the background and development of the Open and Ethical Elections Program; explains how it works, including funding, candidate certification, and reporting requirements; analyzes its impact on 2007 and 2009 elections; and suggests improvements

Natural Strategic Abilities in Voting Protocols

Security properties are often focused on the technological side of the system. One implicitly assumes that the users will behave in the right way to preserve the property at hand. In real life, this cannot be taken for granted. In particular, security mechanisms that are difficult and costly to use are often ignored by the users, and do not really defend the system against possible attacks. Here, we propose a graded notion of security based on the complexity of the user's strategic behavior. More precisely, we suggest that the level to which a security property $\varphi$ is satisfied can be defined in terms of (a) the complexity of the strategy that the voter needs to execute to make $\varphi$ true, and (b) the resources that the user must employ on the way. The simpler and cheaper to obtain $\varphi$, the higher the degree of security. We demonstrate how the idea works in a case study based on an electronic voting scenario. To this end, we model the vVote implementation of the \Pret voting protocol for coercion-resistant and voter-verifiable elections. Then, we identify "natural" strategies for the voter to obtain receipt-freeness, and measure the voter's effort that they require. We also look at how hard it is for the coercer to compromise the election through a randomization attack