Page 10 - Towards Trustworthy Elections New Directions in Electronic Voting by Ed Gerck (auth.), David Chaum, Markus Jakobsson, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Josh Benaloh, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Ben Adida ( (z-lib.org (1)

E. Gerck
2
We raise this conjecture in order to show the need for a new, comprehensive
voting process model that can be used to explain the observed behavior with
any type of voting process (with or without ballots) in the presence of faults,
attacks and threats by adversaries. We want the model (hereafter, the Voting
Information Transfer Model or VITM) to predict potential areas of improvement
with an effective design that improves election outcome trustworthiness. We
further want the model to be promotive of voting system requirements (hereafter,
the Requirements) that include the secret ballot and allow a conforming voting
means (exemplified by the Witness-Voting System or WVS) to be developed.
Since the assertions of any such model have to do with the relationships
between information elements such as sender, recipient, encoder, decoder, mes-
sages, and interference representing, for example, avoter castingaballot in the
presence of an adversary, the VITM is based on Shannon’s Information Theory
[9–13], where information is essentially stochastic in nature. We posit that insuf-
ficient consideration of this circumstance lies at the root of the difficulties with
voting systems at this time.
In other words, after centuries of experience with paper ballot voting and
decades of experience with computerized and electronic voting, we reached what
2
we could call a classical barrier. If we want to make progress, we cannot continue
to treat voting information classically, although the ballot cast by a voter is and
remains deterministic.

1.1 Outline
Section 2 is an informal presentation of our approach with a first, highly simpli-
fied, WVS implementation.
Sections 3 and 4 discuss current problems and previous work, for both paper
ballots and electronic voting, focusing on voter privacy and election outcome
trustworthiness.
Section 5 presents the intuition that, although voting is a deterministic pro-
cess, in order to qualitatively improve how to best cast and count ballots in
the presence of faults, attacks and threats by adversaries, we will have to look
further into the information flow using Information Theory.
The three components of our framework are the model, the requirements, and
the conforming voting means, as respectively defined:

Voting Information Transfer Model (Section 6)
Voting System Requirements (Section 7)
Witness-Voting System (Section 8)
Section 8 includes the detailed presentation of a second WVS implementation,
extended from our first results [14] in 2001. In the Conclusions, we discuss exten-
sions and applications. We note that this work is applicable not only to voting
per se but also to voter registration and other aspects of the voting process that
are relevant to voter privacy and election outcome trustworthiness.
2
Hereafter, the term classical indicates that information is treated deterministically.