Andy Neff: "Trustworthy Electronic Election Results without Trusted Machines" 1/13/05

Dr. Andy Neff of VoteHere, Inc. will be speaking on Thursday, January 13th at 11am in Maxwell Dworkin G115.  Abstract:  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 business and finance. 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.  (Continued - click "Read more")

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 counters -- people or machines. Our focus in this talk will be on describing a new protocol, executable by voters while in the poll booth, that eliminates the need for voters to trust the vote casting devices (DREs) 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 contradictory 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 -- even when the voter is faced with the threat of coercion. Hence we may obtain for our large scale secret ballot elections the same certainty one obtains when counting a simple show of hands.