Trustworthy Electronic Election Results without Trusted Machines

There is an interesting talk coming up at the UW on electronic voting. If you can't go in person, note that this will also be broadcast online live and on-demand as well as on UWTV (TV broadcast is significantly delayed). http://www.cs.washington.edu/news/colloq.info.html Andrew Neff, VoteHere.com Tuesday, November 23, 2004 @ 3:30 pm @ UW, EE-105 Electronic devices and systems potentially offer many of the same benefits to the process of conducting elections that they have already delivered to the worlds of finance and business. Unfortunately, the requirement for ballot secrecy, along with the high degree of complexity possible in today's devices, makes it impossible for the general voting population to directly infer that systems tasked with collecting and counting votes are behaving accurately and honestly. Recently, verifiable mix net and homomorphic tabulation protocols have effectively solved the problem of publicly counting encrypted ballots, thereby eliminating the need to trust special vote counting software and hardware. Our focus in this talk will be on describing a new protocol executable by voters while in the poll booth, that eliminates the need to trust the vote casting software and hardware as well. By way of a challenge-response scheme, the voting device is prevented from casting an encrypted ballot which is inconsistent with the voter's intent without showing evidence thereof -- evidence which the voter can easily detect by simple inspection. To prevent vote tampering after ballots have been cast, each voter is given a receipt which can be used to audit the public ballot box. However, because part of the voter's proof of ballot correctness is derived from direct observation in the poll booth of the temporal sequence by which the receipt is formed, the receipt is meaningless to someone else. Voters can thus track their own ballots through the final count, and dispute any discrepancy between it and their intended choices, but they are not provided with any evidence that can prove to someone else which candidates -- or issues -- they voted for, even under the treat of coercion. Refreshments to be served in room prior to talk.