Abstract
In the ongoing debate between the proponents of electronic and paper voting, a frequently used argument is that electronic voting is susceptible to electronic attacks, and those are less detectable by a human than physical ones. This paper contributes to the research of electronic attacks against paper voting by building a proof-of-concept classifier for audio samples recorded while writing numbers. Such a classifier can be used to break the privacy, for example, in case of preferential voting ballot sheets, or voting systems where the voter must fill in the candidate number. We estimate the quality of the classifier and discuss its implications to the physical security measures of polling stations and ballot design.
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US patent no. 90,646, patented June 1st, 1869.
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This option has been used to cast protest votes. For example, in 1985, Donald Duck received 291 votes in Sweden. As a result, voting for non-existing candidates was prohibited in Sweden starting from 2006: https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/WolfFiles/story?id=91051&page=1.
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Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the Estonian Research Council under Institutional Research Grant IUT27-1 and the European Regional Development Fund through the Estonian Centre of Excellence in ICT Research (EXCITE) and the grant number EU48684. We would also like to thank all the volunteers contributing the writing samples used in this research, anonymous reviewers for their comments, and our shepherd Dr. Marco Prandini for helpful and thought-provoking discussions.
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Krips, K., Willemson, J., Värv, S. (2018). Implementing an Audio Side Channel for Paper Voting. In: Krimmer, R., et al. Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11143. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00419-4_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00419-4_9
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