Page 41 - 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)

The Witness-Voting System
well a voting system is to perform (performance) and under what conditions it
is to operate (environmental and non-functional). The Requirements meet or ex-
ceed current public-election voting requirements. With our approach, the voter
and the vote are unlinkable (secret ballot) although each is identifiable. 33
We showed that conceptual interference can be physically prevented by the
WVS. Conversely, ignoring such possibility in the system design could create
conditions for unintended conceptual and physical interference.
The WVS can achieve an error-free election outcome by optimally preempting,
or at least resolving, any dispute regarding accuracy, reliability, voter privacy,
and election outcome trustworthiness.
The WVS design is open to the inclusion of public witnesses and readers,
including diverse cast ballot witnesses and error-correcting modules for tallying.
This invites stakeholders to be part of the election setup and assures trans-
parency regarding any step that may be seen as critical to the trustworthiness
of the election’s outcome.
We showed, quite generally and with potential applications to other security
problems, that the oft-cited security paradigm “the weakest link defines the se-
curity of the system” does not apply to the WVS. Perfection of each human and
each element of hardware and software is not required. Perfect independence is
also not required in order for witnesses and readers to be useful in reducing the
effects of errors and fraud. Rather, a central aspect of the WVS is that, exactly
because we know that all elements are imperfect, there are enough (as quali-
fiedinSection6.3, Error-Free Condition) multiple correction channels providing
feedback in order to enable the WVS to fully offset the influence of interference
such as caused by faults, attacks and threats by adversaries.
We discussed two WVS conforming implementations. The first WVS was
highly simplified and used intuitive requirements, with the objective of highlight-
ing the basic concepts used in our approach. A more practical WVS implemen-
tation followed the model presentation and the qualified requirements, including
many considerations of our approach. Notably missing from our implementation
discussions here, but referenced in our approach, we did not provide examples
of voter registration, voter authentication, and ballot authentication, as well as
their use in terms of specifying a “closed-circle” voting process.
The Witness-Voting System can also be applied to existing electronic voting
machines (e.g., DRE), including “black box” voting machines (with closed-source
software), to verify their accuracy and reliability before, after, and during an
election. Paper based voting systems, including optical scan ballots, may also
benefit by using the Witness-Voting System as a verification enhancement and
in providing multiple correction channels.
One of the most used correction channels is still the human factor (e.g., reading
the paper ballot). Yet, this does not mean that the human factor must remain as
the single correction channel in voting. We consider all-electronic and online voting
systems as firm possibilities when the capacity of correction channels is increased.
Mounting economic, political and social factors press for an evolution in vot-
ing, a par with everything else. More voter convenience with less cost and less