Page 38 - 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)

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E. Gerck
Perspective
8.2
Here we provide a road-map to understand the WVS development.
Voting systems comprise four main components: [17]
(i) a registration service for verifying and registering legitimate voters,
(ii) voting stations where the voter makes choices on a ballot,
(iii) a device called the ballot box where the ballot is collected, and
(iv) a tallying service that counts the votes and announces the results.
This work focuses on the latter three parts, but it can also be applied to improve
the trustworthiness of voter registration. 33
As it should be clear, this work does not propose any change in voting per
se but a qualitative change in how we understand and mathematically model
voting. Our approach comes from the realization that even though (a) voting is
deterministic, (b) does not include random sampling, and (c) all ballots must
be counted, it innately uses communication processes where, when we look close
enough, information must be defined by a stochastic model as pointed out in
Information Theory [9, 11].
The principles behind our approach are well-known since 1948 and have stood
the test of time as standard practice in modeling and optimizing information
flow, reliability, and availability. We note that contrary to its common use in
cryptography [10], Information Theory was not used in this work with the goal
to provide or improve upon communication secrecy per se, even though it is used
for example in meeting the secret ballot requirement.
In this work we used the Voting Information Transfer Model (VITM) to model,
in terms of information transfer, how voting works and how the election outcome
can be reliably and accurately measured, from the moment the voter asks for a
ballot to the moment that all votes are tallied and made public.
Our approach to voting has been publicly discussed since January 2000, with
public input [45, 46] and with the help from experts who worked on and verified
elections in the US and abroad for more than 25 years.
Leading a public discussion [47] at the Brookings Institute, we emphasized
early on the need for unlinkability (see Section 7.1) regarding fail-safe privacy
assurances in voting. This is a basic condition in our approach. The significant
aspect is that in order to preserve election integrity, the only person to whom the
vote is proved should be the voter himself.
Also in 2000, we presented some early results of the VITM application with
the Multi-Party protocol [41], which has been in continuous use by Safevote with
online voting in elections worldwide.
In 2001 we proposed and solved the “fundamental problem in voting” [18] also
using the VITM. Work on voting systems and requirements [18, 40] provided the

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Voter registration receives little scrutiny in general, yet it can create numerous dif-
ficulties and disenfranchise many voters. Efforts to manipulate the number and po-
litical affiliation of persons voting may compromise an election even if the voting
system is error-free.