6 research outputs found
Comparing "challenge-based" and "code-based" internet voting verification implementations
Internet-enabled voting introduces an element of invisibility and unfamiliarity into the voting process, which makes it very different from traditional voting. Voters might be concerned about their vote being recorded correctly and included in the final tally. To mitigate mistrust, many Internet-enabled voting systems build verifiability into their systems. This allows voters to verify that their votes have been cast as intended, stored as cast and tallied as stored at the conclusion of the voting period. Verification implementations have not been universally successful, mostly due to voter difficulties using them. Here, we evaluate two cast as intended verification approaches in a lab study: (1) "Challenge-Based" and (2) "Code-Based". We assessed cast-as-intended vote verification efficacy, and identified usability issues related to verifying and/or vote casting. We also explored acceptance issues post-verification, to see whether our participants were willing to engage with Internet voting in a real election. Our study revealed the superiority of the code-based approach, in terms of ability to verify effectively. In terms of real-life Internet voting acceptance, convenience encourages acceptance, while security concerns and complexity might lead to rejection
Assertion-Based Approaches to Auditing Complex Elections, with Application to Party-List Proportional Elections
Risk-limiting audits (RLAs), an ingredient in evidence-based elections, are
increasingly common. They are a rigorous statistical means of ensuring that
electoral results are correct, usually without having to perform an expensive
full recount -- at the cost of some controlled probability of error. A recently
developed approach for conducting RLAs, SHANGRLA, provides a flexible framework
that can encompass a wide variety of social choice functions and audit
strategies. Its flexibility comes from reducing sufficient conditions for
outcomes to be correct to canonical `assertions' that have a simple
mathematical form.
Assertions have been developed for auditing various social choice functions
including plurality, multi-winner plurality, super-majority, Hamiltonian
methods, and instant runoff voting. However, there is no systematic approach to
building assertions. Here, we show that assertions with linear dependence on
transformations of the votes can easily be transformed to canonical form for
SHANGRLA. We illustrate the approach by constructing assertions for party-list
elections such as Hamiltonian free list elections and elections using the
D'Hondt method, expanding the set of social choice functions to which SHANGRLA
applies directly.Comment: 16 page
Speed Dating: An OBU Opera Production
https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/f17_dating/1023/thumbnail.jp