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Seminars given
July 24, 2008 - Prêt à Voter with Paillier Encryption
by Peter Ryan
| Abstract: | Public confidence in voting technologies has been badly shaken over the past years by, amongst other events, the problems with the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, the 2007 French presidential election and the 2007 electronic counting in Scotland. Serious vulnerabilities have been exposed in all currently deployed electronic voting and counting systems. Many of these systems use proprietary, protected code and the voters and election officials are expected to take assurances of the suppliers and certifiers on trust.
Designing Voting systems that provide high levels of assurance of accuracy and ballot secrecy with minimal trust assumptions is an immensely challenging one. The requirements of accuracy and auditability are in direct conflict with those of ballot secrecy. Furthermore, we must recognise that this is not a purely technical problem: a technically perfect solution that is not usable or does not command the confidence of the voters is not a viable solution.
Recently significant progress has been made and a number of schemes developed that provide verifiability of the election. These seek to provide end-to-end verifiability of the outcome, i.e. the accuracy of the outcome is independent of the code or hardware that implements the ballot processing. The assurance derives from maximal transparency and auditability. Voters are provided with the means to check that their vote is accurately included in the final tally, all the while maintaining ballot secrecy. Thus the assurance depends ultimately on the voters rather than the probity of election officials, suppliers of voting systems etc.
In this talk, I describe a particularly voter-friendly approach to achieving verifiability: Prêt à Voter and, in particular, recent developments, notably the use of Paillier encryption.
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