Putting the Human Back in Voting Protocols

Abstract

I’d like to talk about the role of the human in voting protocols. Basically I want to argue that voting protocols seem to be particularly interesting from the point of view of the theme of this workshop, in the sense that the users of the system actually play a particularly important role in trying to maintain the assurance of the system itself. I’m interested in a particular class of voting protocols, so-called voter verifiable schemes, which aim to allow the voter to play an active role in contributing to the dependability and assurance of the system. In designing these systems, clearly that we want high assurance of accuracy, but on the other hand we have to balance that with maintaining the ballot secrecy, so that nobody can work out which way a particular individual voter voted, and we want to do it in such a way that we place minimal, or ideally, zero trust in components, such as, hardware, software, the voting officials, and so on, and suppliers.