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
