Page 9 - 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
Ed Gerck
Safevote, Inc.
P.O. Box 9765, San Diego CA 92169, USA
egerck@safevote.com
http://safevote.com

Abstract. We present a new, comprehensive framework to qualitatively
improve election outcome trustworthiness, where voting is modeled as an
information transfer process. Although voting is deterministic (all bal-
lots are counted), information is treated stochastically using Informa-
tion Theory. Error considerations, including faults, attacks, and threats
by adversaries, are explicitly included. The influence of errors may be
corrected to achieve an election outcome error as close to zero as de-
sired (error-free), with a provably optimal design that is applicable to
any type of voting, with or without ballots. Sixteen voting system re-
quirements, including functional, performance, environmental and non-
functional considerations, are derived and rated, meeting or exceeding
current public-election requirements. The voter and the vote are un-
linkable (secret ballot) although each is identifiable. The Witness-Voting
System (Gerck, 2001) is extended as a conforming implementation of
the provably optimal design that is error-free, transparent, simple, scal-
able, robust, receipt-free, universally-verifiable, 100% voter-verified, and
end-to-end audited.

Keywords: voting, trustworthiness, secret ballot, error-free.

1 Introduction

It is known that current voting systems when applied to public elections consis-
tently produce results that are untrustworthy [1–3]. Centuries of experience with
paper ballot voting, decades of experience with the computerization of election-
related functions and with electronic ballots have not significantly altered this
picture [4–8].
1
Many blame the secret ballot requirement as posing an impossible problem to
solve. Rather, such examples, together with the unsuccessful attempts to improve
election outcome trustworthiness, suggest that there is today no effective model
of how information should be collected and handled in a realistic voting system
environment that includes faults, attacks and threats by adversaries.
1
A secret ballot (voter privacy) is commonly used to prevent voter coercion and
vote buying. Voter privacy is legally protected in many jurisdictions. For example, a
provision of the US Washington State Constitution states: “secure[s] to every elector
absolute secrecy in preparing and depositing his ballot”.

D. Chaum et al. (Eds.): Towards Trustworthy Elections, LNCS 6000, pp. 1–36, 2010.
c IAVOSS/Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010