[liberationtech] Resources on electronic voting

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

Hello:

Electronic voting is what I do in Agora Ciudadana :-) [1]. There are
different ways to do it. You can go all the way and do Internet
voting, like they do in Estonia [2], or you can use electronic voting
booths, which can either be like an electronic cashier but for votes,
or they might just register digitally the paper votes.

Some methods involve advanced homomorphic encryption tools to securely
record tally and verify the vote like in Estonia. Other methods just
are an electronic voting machine, that aim to reduce human error and
tallying time.

One very important thing to take into account when doing electronic
voting is authentication. In Estonia they have an electronic ID card,
so authentication is easy. There's no such thing in USA or UK, for
example.

You can use electronic voting officially in an election or referendum
state/nation-wide, or you can use it for other use cases. For secure
Internet voting, you can take a look at  Helios [3], libre software
and used by a Cryptographers Association, or other proposals that mix
paper ballots with cryptography like wombat [4].

If you are interested in the cryptography and are looking for some
academic papers, I can tell you that there mainly two cryptographic
ways to do elections securely: using homomorphic encryption or
mixnets. Take a look at papers like [5] [6] [7]. And there are many
more papers on the subject, of course.

Finally, here's a talk by ben adida about why electronic voting is so
hard [8], which tries to answer what's so hard about running an
election and if technology can help.

In Agora Voting we're now trying to implement the first secure liquid
voting system, because it'll be used in three months by a congressman
in Spain. We haven't been lucky finding funds so far though..

Kind regards,
--
[1] https://agoravoting.com
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
[3] https://heliosvoting.org
[4] http://www.wombat-voting.com/
[5] http://cryptodrm.engr.uconn.edu/adder/acsac.pdf
[6] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/civitas-tr.pdf
[7] http://heliosvoting.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/evtwote10-1.pdf
[8] https://air.mozilla.org/wheres-my-vote/

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 7:36 PM, Marcin de Kaminski
<marcin at dekaminski.se> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> Sorry to ask such a general question but I need input on the issue of electronic voting. Is there any comprehensive collection of resources or (preferably academic) research already out there?
>
> Any other input or links to prior discussions on this list would be most helpful as well.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Marcin
> --
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-- 
Eduardo Robles Elvira     +34 668 824 393            skype: edulix2
http://www.wadobo.com    it's not magic, it's wadobo!