Page 105 - 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)

A Modular Voting Architecture (“Frog Voting”)
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Shuki Bruck ,David Jefferson , and Ronald L. Rivest 3
1
CalTech
bruck@caltech.edu
2
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
d jefferson@yahoo.com
3
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139
rivest@mit.edu
Abstract. This paper presents a new framework–a reference architecture–
for voting that we feel has many attractive features. It is not a machine
design, but rather a framework that will stimulate innovation and design.
It is potentially the standard architecture for all future voting equip-
ment. The ideas expressed here are subject to improvement and further
research.
(An early version of this paper appeared in [2, Part III]. This version of
the paper is very similar, but contains a postscript (Section 8) providing
commentary and discussion of perspectives on this proposal generated
during the intervening years between 2001 and 2008.)

1 A Modular Voting Architecture–Overview

We call our framework A Modular Voting Architecture (AMVA). With AMVA
votes are recorded on physical items we call “Frogs”-a term chosen specifically
to convey no information about the physical form of the recording device. (Frog
is not an acronym. A picture of a Frog was chosen as a convenient piece of
clip art designed to get the reader’s mind off of a specific technology, such as
paper, mechanical devices, computer screens, or voice recorders.) A Frog is more
than a ballot because it contains information besides the list of votes cast. It
also contains information about the official who signed in the voter, about the
precinct, and about the form of the ballot. A Frog should be a physical object. It
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is deposited and becomes part of the audit trail when the voter casts her vote .
A central design choice for this architecture is that we separate the processes
of (1) recording a voter’s choices on a Frog (capture of voter’s selections), and
(2) casting the vote using the Frog as input. This separation is familiar to voters
using paper ballots or optical scan equipment, but not to those who use typical
DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machines.
This separation is crucial. It can help reduce or even eliminate a number of
problems with existing voting technology (as discussed in [2]). These problems
include security threats posed by complex electronic voting machines, the decline
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For convenience in this paper, voters will be feminine.

D. Chaum et al. (Eds.): Towards Trustworthy Elections, LNCS 6000, pp. 97–106, 2010.
c IAVOSS/Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010