Cryptographic Protocols for Electronic Voting Essay -- Technology Elec

Cryptographic Protocols for Electronic Voting After some preliminary research into the subject of electronic voting [BARL2003], it became apparent that there may be reason to mistrust current electronic voting systems. Further, as I studied a variety of voting systems, I realized I had little confidence that any of them (even paper ballots) would be guaranteed to produce a perfectly accurate tally. In my previous paper [BARL2003], I suggested the following definition: "An accurate voting system counts all valid votes with minimal processing error such that the intent of eligible voters is reflected in the final tally." I believe it is important for a voting system to (a) minimize error, (b) count all valid votes, and (c) preserve the intent of eligible voters in the final tally. At least in theory, I believe that today's electronic voting systems are capable of counting votes with minimal processing error. Assuming that all parties involved in the process of creating an electronic voting machine perform ethically, and that enough time, money, and effort is expended to do the job correctly, it should be possible to create a system that processes each entry that was received by the system. However, even making those assumptions, it is not quite that simple. There may be many reasons that a valid entry is not received by the system. For example, voters may be confused by the systems and may not enter their selections into the machine they way they intended. The system may "crash" before reporting its results. An eligible voter may be denied access to voting machines during the election interval . As far as I have been able to determine, the process for deciding the validity of a vote is subject to interpret... .../www.notablesoftware.com/Papers/1002evot.pdf [MERC2003] Mercuri, Rebecca. Website on "Electronic Voting" last updated September 1, 2003. http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html [PFIT1996] Pfitzmann, Birgit. Digital Signature Schemes: General Framework and Fail-Stop Signatures; Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1996. [PITT2003] Pitt, William Rivers. "Electronic Voting: What You Need to Know," Interview with Rebecca Mercuri, Barbara Simons, and David Dill, October 20, 2003. http://truthout.org/docs_03/102003A.shtml [RaRaNa] Ray, Indrajit and Ray, Indrakshi and Narasimhamurthi, Natarajan. "An Anonymous Electronic Voting Protocol for Voting Over the Internet." (Date of publication unknown.) http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/471417.html [SCHN1996] Schneier, Bruce. Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C; John Wiley & Sons, New York 1996.