Page 91 - 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 Secure Architecture for Voting Electronically
(SAVE)
1
Jonathan A. Goler and Edwin J. Selker 2
1
MIT
jagoler@berkeley.edu
2
Excubate
ted.selker@gmail.com

1 Introduction

Electronic voting has the potential to be the most reliable, secure and trustwor-
thy form of voting implemented. Digital technology, complete with error correc-
tion, robust storage and cryptographic security offers the possibility to record,
transmit, store and tabulate votes far more reliably than paper. While current
implementations of electronic voting have been susceptible to various failures,
electronic voting itself is not fundamentally flawed. The Secure Architecture for
Voting Electronically (SAVE) is one proposed architecture for mitigating secu-
rity and trust issues with the voting process. In addition, the architecture enables
academics, small companies and organizations to easily and cheaply build their
own modules conforming to the standard.
Unfortunately, the first few examples of electronic voting machines have done
little to inspire confidence in the technology. Early touchscreen systems (Direct
Recording Electric or DRE) have suffered from poor user interfaces, system
failures and data loss, resulting in voter frustration and distrust. One possible
solution that is often presented as a solution to the trustworthiness of electronic
voting systems is a Voter Verifiable Paper Trail (VVPT) [19] or more generally,
Audit Trail (VVAT). VVATs are implemented as separate devices attached to,
or observing the voting process, and indicating on a separate recording device,
the selections of the voter.
Although the media has focused on recent failures of electronic voting systems,
paper and mechanical systems have historically been easy to manipulate as well.
Naturally, the term ’stuffing the ballot box’ comes from the simple fraudulent
addition of paper ballots. Computation actually enables better security through
cryptographic means to ensure the propriety of votes cast and counted. In addi-
tion, electronic voting enables new classes of voting interfaces that would enable
voters who have been discouraged from voting in the past.
Electronic voting systems present the opportunity to enfranchise many voters
who would ordinarily have great difficulty voting [9,6,3,2]. Voting with assistive
or speech interfaces as well as alternate means of ballot presentation could aid
people with diminished motor capacity, visual impairments and even some cog-
nitive impairments. If the general system of recording and processing votes is

D. Chaum et al. (Eds.): Towards Trustworthy Elections, LNCS 6000, pp. 83–96, 2010.
c IAVOSS/Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010