SeRTVS – Secure, Reliable and Trustworthy Voting System

Principal Investigator: Prof. Peter Ryan
Funding source(s): CORE/FNR

Background
Ensuring that the outcome of an election is demonstrably correct while maintaining ballot privacy and minimising the dependence on election officials has been a challenge since the dawn of democracy. For over a century the US has experimented with various technologies to try to make voting easier and more secure. All of these have proved problematic, most notably the more recent use of touch screen machines. The danger here is that the outcome is criticially dependent on the correct execution of the code running on the voting devices.
Recent research has explored the use of modern cryptography to address this challenge. Significant advances have been made, in particular advancing the notion of “voter-verifiability”: allowing voters to confirm that their vote is accurately counted while avoiding threats of vote buying or coercion. Notable amongst such schemes is the Prêt à Voter system, proposed by the PI in 2004 and subsequently developed to make it more usable, secure and flexible. The Prêt à Voter approach is widely regarded as one of the most secure and useable of such schemes and is arguably the most promising in terms of providing a practical scheme for real-world use.
This proposal is based on a successful EPSRC proposal submitted jointly by the PI along with Steve Schneider of Surrey University and Mark Ryan of Birmingham University, while the PI was still at Newcastle University. The UK proposal is for ~GBP 1.5m for 4 years and was ranked top in panel. It is expected to have its formal kick-off meeting in the autumn of 2009.
Aims
This proposal will develop and evaluate designs for practical, secure voting systems. Such schemes should yield a demonstrably correct outcome of the election while guaranteeing ballot privacy. Furthermore, such systems must be sufficiently simple to use and understandable as to gain widespread acceptance by voters and other stakeholders.
The starting point will be the existing Prêt à Voter and Pretty Good Democracy schemes. Vulnerability or deficiencies identified during the evaluation will be addressed by enhancements to the scheme.
To date, very little has been done to investigate robust recovery mechanisms for voting systems. The project will develop effective recovery mechanisms and strategies.
The project will also investigate the issues of public perception and trust of verifiable systems. It is not enough for the system to be trustworthy; it must also be universally perceived as trustworthy. A goal therefore to measure and promote public understand and trust in such schemes.