EVMs

Towards Better Voting Technology Research: Building a Research-Industry Dialogue

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:42:14 -0700

On March 13, 2007, the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project convened a Voting Systems Vendor Workshop on the Caltech campus involving a small group of academics and representatives from the voting systems industry. As an outcome of this one-day event, we present the following report and recommendations. This event was supported by grants from The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We thank them for their support of our ongoing efforts.

American Confidence in Electronic Voting and Ballot Counting: A Pre-Election Update

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:19:51 -0700

This study examines the confidence that voters have that their ballot was counted accurately in 2004 and the attitudes of the American public toward electronic voting. As many states and localities move to new—and often electronic—voting systems, understanding public confidence and public attitudes is critical for policy makers. This study includes several key findings:

There has been a decline in confidence among voters from 2005 to 2006 that their vote in 2004 was counted accurately. Part of this decline is likely the result of a prospective concern that their vote in 2006 may not be counted accurately.
African Americans are currently less confident than whites that their votes were counted accurately.
Roughly one-third of respondents did not have an opinion about the potential benefits or liabilities of electronic voting systems. This may represent uncertainty about electronic voting machines, a lack of familiarity with them, or ambivalence about their use.
The public views electronic voting as making voting easier for people with disabilities and making it more accurate to vote.
The public also thinks that electronic voting machines are prone to unintentional failures and agreed that they increase the potential for fraud.

LEVI User Manual

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:49:28 -0700

A user manual for LEVI voting systems.

Who does better with a big interface? Improving Voting Performance of Reading Disabled Voters

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:33:00 -0700

This study shows how ballot interfaces variably affect the voting performance of people with different abilities. An interface with all information viewable simultaneously might either help orient or overwhelm a voter, depending on his/her skill-set. Voters with diagnosed reading disabilities performed significantly better on full-faced voting machines than those who demonstrated a high likelihood of similar, but undiagnosed, disabilities. In contrast, the diagnosed group performed worse than others when using standard-sized Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems. We suspect that this observed difference in performance is due to the interaction of system features with learned coping techniques, which allow diagnosed reading disabled voters to function effectively in other parts of everyday life. The full-faced system provides a means of orienting but not of guiding the voter, while the standard DRE guides the users through the voting process without giving the voter a means of orienting themselves. A hybrid design that incorporates the advantages of both these systems might be beneficial for both reading disabled and non-reading disabled voters.

Auditing Technology for Electronic Voting Machines

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:49:49 -0700

Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machine security has been a significant topic of contention ever since Diebold voting machine code turned up on a public internet site in 2003 and computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University declared the machine “unsuitable for use in a general election.” Since then, many people from computer scientists to politicians have begun to insist that DREs be equipped with a paper trail. A paper trail provides a paper printout for the voter to approve at the end of each voting session. Although there have been strong political efforts to place paper trails on DRE machines, there have not been any scientific studies to indicate that paper trails are effective audits. This work describes a user study done to compare paper trails to audio audits, a new proposal for DRE auditing. Participants in the study completed four elections on a voting machine with a paper trail and four elections on a machine with an audio trail. There were purposeful mistakes inserted into the audits on some of the machines. Results from the study indicated that participants were able to find almost 10 times as many errors in the audio audit then they were able to find in the paper trail. Voters’ attitudes towards the paper audit were extremely apathetic, and voters did not spend much time reviewing their paper record. When asked which type of audit voters would prefer for their own county elections, almost all voters preferred the VVPAT. These results indicate that newer alternative audit technology holds great promise in delivering a safe and accurate audit and further that paper trails have some significant design obstacles that need to be overcome before they will be effective audits.

Encrypted Receipts for Voter-Verified Elections Using Homomorphic Encryption

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:35:11 -0700

Voters are now demanding the ability to verify that their votes are cast and counted as intended. Most existing cryptographic election protocols do not treat the voter as a computationally-limited entity separate from the voting booth, and therefore do not ensure that the voting booth records the correct vote. David Chaum and Andrew Neff have proposed mixnet schemes that do provide this assurance, but little research has been done that combines voter veriﬁcation with homomorphic encryption. This thesis proposes adding voter veriﬁcation to an existing multi-candidate election scheme (Baudron et al.) that uses Paillier encryption. A “cut and choose” protocol provides a probabilistic guarantee of correctness. The scheme is straightforward, and could easily be extended to multi-authority elections. The feasibility of the proposed scheme is demonstrated via a simple implementation.