07 May 2015 - Peter Ryan

Abstract

Democracy, in particular the conduct of elections faces major challenges. Rarely a day goes past without reports of contested elections somewhere in the world. Traditional ways of conducting elections are often thrown into doubt, see for example the "Where is my Vote?" campaign in Iran. Attempts to introduce technological approaches to voting are also highly controversial, see for example the US, the Netherlands, etc. Over the past few decades cryptographers and information security experts have turned their attention to this topic. The challenge is to reconcile the conflicting requirements of assurance of accuracy on the one hand and ballot privacy on the other. Modern cryptography has enabled the remarkable new notion of "end-to-end verifiability" as a way to allow voters to confirm that their vote is accurately included in the tally while not revealing to a third party how they voted.

 

In this talk I will present a brief history of progress in this field and describe how such schemes are making it out of the lab into the real world, I will focus primarily on the Prȇt à Voter scheme and the experiences of its deployment in the state elections in Victoria State Australia.

 

Time permitting, I will also outline a new voting scheme that tries to give the voter a more intuitive way to verify her vote.