Page 40 - 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
Conclusions
9
Our presentation scope focuses on voting. We preface our conclusions, however,
by noting that this approach can also be applied to improve the trustworthiness
of voter registration and other aspects of an election, such as ballot design and
provisional voting. Voter registration receives little scrutiny in general, yet it can
create numerous difficulties and disenfranchise many voters. Efforts to manipu-
late the number and political affiliation of persons voting may compromise an
election even if the voting system is error-free. The Requirements presented here
can also be used to guide the development of more effective legal regulations.
This work shows that although voting is a deterministic process, the long-
standing problem of election outcome trustworthiness cannot be described, much
less solved, deterministically. Information is essentially stochastic in its nature
and voting, as a process that transfers information from voters to tally results,
is no exception in its use of information.
The Voting Information Transfer Model (VITM) presented in this work is an
information transfer model based on observables (i.e., witnesses or references)
and observers (i.e., adequate readers of the witnesses). The VITM applies to any
type of voting, with or without ballots, paper based, electronic, or online.
The VITM allows us to look deeper into the information flow of the voting
process, where information has to be modeled stochastically using Information
Theory. However, to prevent any confusion, we emphasized that the ballot seen
and cast by a voter is not a stochastic variable in our approach.
Anything that perturbs the election outcome is defined as interference,the
same definition used in Information Theory. The VITM further distinguishes
interference with functional and performance influence (called physical interfer-
ence) from interference with environmental and non-functional influence (called
conceptual interference). Accordingly, our formalism is expressive enough to
comprise a variety of means that can be falsely used to influence elections with-
out voting, including interference that does not even exist physically but merely
stays as a perceived threat.
The VITM directly uses results previously developed in 60 years of experience
with Information Theory to define a provably optimal design that can reduce
election outcome error to a value as close to zero as desired, which we call error-
free, establish comprehensive Voting System Requirements (Requirements) to
combat interference, and implement a conforming voting means —the Witness-
Voting System (WVS).
The [VITM, Requirements, WVS] define the three components of our frame-
work, describing a realistic voting system environment that includes interference
of the election outcome from faults, attacks and threats by adversaries.
In such a framework, requirements are not arbitrary. Requirements are cre-
ated and dictated by the goal of minimizing interference. Some Requirements
are naturally motivated in the VITM, such as the secret ballot, one valid bal-
lot per voter, and transparency. We present sixteen Requirements, including
functional, performance, environmental and non-functional considerations, pre-
senting a comprehensive consideration as to what is to be done (functional), how