Of Elections and Electrons

Abstract

Digital voting technologies are currently very topical and hotly debated, especially in the US with a presidential election looming. It is essential that voting systems are both trustworthy and trusted. Various schemes and technologies have been proposed, and indeed deployed, that take drastically different approaches to achieving assurance. At one end of the spectrum, we have approaches that claim to achieve assurance through system verification and testing. At the other end, we have the run-time monitoring school. Another way to characterize this dichotomy is to observe that the former approach seeks to verify the electoral system, the latter seeks to verify an actual election.