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A Formally Verified Single Transferable Voting Scheme with Fractional Values

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Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10615))

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Abstract

We formalise a variant of the Single Transferable Vote scheme with fractional transfer values in the theorem prover Coq. Our method advocates the idea of vote counting as application of a sequence of rules. The rules are an intermediate step for specifying the protocol for vote-counting in a precise symbolic language. We then formalise these rules in Coq. This reduces the gap between the legislation and formalisation so that, without knowledge of formal methods, one can still validate the process. Moreover our encoding is modular which enables us to capture other Single Transferable Vote schemes without significant changes. Using the built-in extraction mechanism of Coq, a Haskell program is extracted automatically. This program is guaranteed to meet its specification. Each run of the program outputs a certificate which is a precise, independently checkable record of the trace of computation and provides all relevant details of how the final result is obtained. This establishes correctness, reliability, and verifiability of the count.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Results have been produced on an Intel i7 3.60 GHz Linux desktop computer with 16 GB of RAM.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research School of Computer Science, ANU, Canberra, Australia

    Milad K. Ghale, Rajeev Goré & Dirk Pattinson

Authors
  1. Milad K. Ghale
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  2. Rajeev Goré
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  3. Dirk Pattinson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dirk Pattinson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Robert Krimmer

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Melanie Volkamer

  3. German Research Institute for Public Administration, Speyer, Germany

    Nadja Braun Binder

  4. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Norbert Kersting

  5. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium

    Olivier Pereira

  6. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Carsten Schürmann

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Ghale, M.K., Goré, R., Pattinson, D. (2017). A Formally Verified Single Transferable Voting Scheme with Fractional Values. In: Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Braun Binder, N., Kersting, N., Pereira, O., Schürmann, C. (eds) Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10615. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_10

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68687-5

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