Usability and Security Standards for Electronic Voting

1. Usability and Security Standards for Electronic Voting IEEE Electronic Voting Workshop Arnold B. Urken Professor of Political Science Stevens Institute of Technology Castle Point on the Hudson Hoboken, New Jersey 07030 aurken@stevens-tech.edu July 28, 2003

2. Electronic Voting Standards Issues • Usability • Plug and play scoring of votes is not simple • Partisan groups should not control the development of alternative scoring methods • Security • “Absolute” privacy is not trustworthy without active auditing • Formal methods should be incorporated into voting standards

3. Usability: Plug and Play Scoring • Alternative scoring affects • Auditing and verification • Presentation of results • Choice of aggregation criteria • “Majority” is not magic • The probability of a tied outcome will increase significantly under some methods • Conflicting definitions of majority must be resolved (e.g., approval voting)

4. Usability: Partisan Issues • Scoring technology will enable communities to consider new options for organizing elections • Partisan interest groups should not be allowed to determine what is feasible • There is no “best” or optimal scoring method for elections

5. Security: Privacy • Technology should be developed to enable desirable social practices to be implemented • Active auditing is needed to cope with benign and malicious error in data collection and server maintenance • Voluntary sharing of vote data is not “unthinkable”

6. Security: Formal Methods • New ways of improving voting security • Type-safe transactions • Prevent malicious/benign error • Open up new options for verification • Model checking • Create an election database: from registration to election outcome • Use model verification to detect random and malicious errors in election processes