Scantegrity on InterGovWorld March 31, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex in : Uncategorized , add a commentEssex and Chaum interviewed by Canadian Government and Technology news source InterGovWorld.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
E2E is my cup ‘o tea March 18, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex and in : Concepts in E2E , 1 comment so farStefan recently came up with a simple way of explaining E2E (receipt-based) voting systems. He said, imagine if your ballot was attached to a string, and at the end of the string was a tag, and on the tag was some (pseudonymous) identifier.
You put the ballot in the ballot box, but leave the string and tag hanging out. Eventually, as people cast their ballots, the strings and ballots become all jumbled up. The next day you could come back and find your tag. You can see your string disappear into the ballot box (and into a knotted ball). But is your ballot still attached to the other end?
The election authority conducts a zero-knowledge proof to demonstrate the strings are all still in one piece by showing the jumble of strings in sections. At each section you can visually inspect that the strings are in one piece, but cannot (simultaneously) tell where they come from or where they go.
So if you can find your tag, and if across the entire length of strings you do not see any cuts, it’s proof your ballot is still in the ballot box somewhere.
I’ve been calling this the “tea-pot” model for (I hope) obvious reasons:
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
When internet voting ruled the Earth March 13, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex and Richard Carback in : Voting Goals, Voting Policy , 3 commentsThinking about remote voting options such as mail-in and internet voting (by which I mean voting remotely via the internet) , a quote from Jurassic Park comes to mind:
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. ”
This comes back to the question of priorities for a country’s democratic process. Given two seemingly rivalrous options, universal accessibility and universal ballot secrecy, which is the priority?
If, as in Canada’s case, you allow everyone the option of using remote voting then at least in theory you cannot guarantee protection from undue influence. It could therefore be said accessibility is given precedence.
It may be that a plausible middle ground is, as has been suggested, that voters are afforded remote voting as an option only if they can demonstrate an accessibility need. Therefore everyone gets access to the election, and ballot secrecy is still maintained for the majority of voters who are (presumably) able to attend the polling place.
So how do you demonstrate and accessibility need? I suppose you cannot directly. But in Canada many aspects of the voting process rely heavily on the use of statutory declarations to get around various unprovable situations. So the scheme would work like this: you get to vote remotely only if you’re absent or otherwise unable to attend the polling place which you affirm in a statutory declaration made as a pre-condition for remote voting.
But again we come back to priorities. In this case there’s a third priority beyond accessibility and secrecy: convenience. So what’s the priority? Should remote voting be about convenience for all voters, or accessibility for special needs voters?
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Scantegrity II Debuts at ITIF Future of Voting Forum
Posted by Aleks Essex and in : Voting Events , 5 commentsScantegrity II (Invisible Ink) is the latest development from the Punchscan/Votegrity team and was unveiled last week in Washington D.C. at the ITIF’s Future of Voting Forum.
Scantegrity II: Voters can mark optical scan ballots with a special pen that reveals a “confirmation code” of their selections. They are free to write this code down and look it up later to confirm the inclusion of their selections in the election outcome.
The debut demonstration of Scantegrity II at the Future of Voting forum.
The Votegrity team at the event.
(L-R: Aleks, Stefan, David, Jeremy, Rick)
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Eesti VOTEariik March 11, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex in : Voting Goals, Voting Policy , 3 commentsVoting through the tubes was a topic came up at the ITIF Future of Voting forum: is internet voting really how we see our future?
According to a Government Computer News article my position is that “the jury is out” on the fundamental acceptability of internet voting and I that go on to point that we should be doing our best to develop secure solutions because with respect to adoption in certain countries “it’s here.” I do not believe these were precise quotes of mine–perhaps taken out of a greater context. So allow me to disagree with “myself.”
Consider Estonia, the first country to offer internet voting. My grandmother–herself Estonian–fled to Canada during WWII to escape the Soviets. Fifty years passed. There were no elections. But when the iron curtain fell, she got to vote in the Estonian national elections–like many there–for the first time in her life. I still remember going with her to a church basement (in small-town Canada) to cast her vote. What would she think about internet voting if she were here today? To be honest, I think she would say, “Estonia’s voting, that’s what I care about.”
But think about it. They’re an internet savvy country, they have a national PKI, and (pursuant to the little history lesson) they have a relatively clean slate in terms of equipment, precedent and procedure (unlike the US). So it really seems they had all the ‘right stuff.’ I admit to even feeling a little 2nd-generation pride that they pulled it off.
But how far does this model extend with respect to other countries? Well, allow me stick to what I can legitimately editorialize on; my own country. The Canadian federal government has been moving toward internetizing services for several years now. I did my taxes yesterday (that is to say, my wife collected my T4’s from me) and we filed our return online. In ‘06 for the first time we were given the option to complete our census questions online. I actually (at the time) got into a protracted clash with the ministry responsible because they absolutely refused to tell me anything about the security of the software they wanted *ME* to use–but that’s another story all together.
But with respect to voting, we’re Austrlian ballot all the way. At least federally and provincially. And what’s more, there seems to be no desire to change. But could we do it? Yes, actually I think so. We have the underlying organizational infrastructure (though no national id smart-cards). The credential-issuing solution would be paper-based and could parallel the existing government e-services. (Except they would likely contract a 3rd party to write the software and then not allow voters to ask how their vote is secured.)
But I see two problems:
- Voting ain’t like taxes or census. Your vote (individually) is not factual information that government is entitled to know.
- The internet voting model doesn’t (or rather hasn’t yet) satisfactorily addressed the issue of vote-buying.
But as Paul DeGregorio pointed out to me, with mail-in voting you can show people how you vote, yet it is an acceptable method, so how is internet voting fundamentally different? I guess I don’t know. But if you spend as much time worrying about voter-privacy as I do, your reaction may be that mail-in voting should not be a valid option for the majority of the voting population.
In the 2006, Elections Canada announced that the mail-in option was made available to every voter. Yet in a different document they say “the security of the ballot is paramount, and the system makes it impossible to discover for whom a specific voter has voted … to ensure that no electors are intimidated or bribed into voting in a particular way.” That would seem to be a contradiction.
Is there not a tipping point where when enough voters use the mail-in option (or by extension the internet option) that the outcome of an election itself is malleable by intimidation or bribery?
I think it comes down to this: what is important? If ballot secrecy is important, then perhaps internet voting is not the correct avenue to pursue (unless you’re trying to include this in the design, which turns out to be pretty difficult–so far). If perhaps you think “well, privacy is dead anyway” then the convenience it offers is attractive. We really should set our priorities straight before we talk about internet voting system design.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
NPR misses the mark on ITIF “Future of Voting” coverage March 7, 2008
Posted by Richard Carback and Aleks Essex in : Voting Policy , 2 commentsAfter the success of the ITIF’s Future of Voting panel, we were surprised by the nature of NPR’s radio coverage. From our perspective the report greatly distorted the tone and focus of the event in an apparent effort to concoct a sense of controversy.
Aspects of the coverage we felt were misleading:
- The title of the report does not reflect the focus. Why would people who oppose paper ballots present a system with…. a paper ballot? The summary of the report is tangential to the event. This event was about new voting research and presented a range of solutions; internet, opscan and DRE based.
- The report begins with a shot directed at the ITIF for AV “technical difficulties.” How is this newsworthy, really? Maybe the reporter could have interviewed the House Administration Committee room’s AV guy and ask him why he didn’t show up to give us access to the equipment. To the ITIF’s credit, they had a backup screen and projector.
- David Dill is interviewed and purported by NPR as providing the “controversy” component, yet was not present at the event. He hasn’t seen the systems nor did he offer any directed criticism about them.
- His comments seemed to be included out of context. Every system presented had a paper ballot capability.1 One focused on overseas voting, and another on usability issues. Our system is an opscan add-on, improving the type of system that David is known to prefer.
- Arguably these technologies are not “on the horizon.” Each group demoed working prototypes at the event and are working with counties to use these systems in public elections.
Stay tuned for more details about the forum. Tomorrow, we will be posting a longer recap with pictures.
1 - Prime III prefers a “video audit trail” that they use in a special way AND have empirical evidence indicating it is faster to audit. Our understanding is that they have a paper trail option built-in already, but if not there’s nothing preventing it and they do not oppose it.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
Event on the hill: The Future of Voting March 3, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex in : Voting Policy , add a commentThe Punchscan team will be in D.C. on Thursday March 6th to present at the ITIF’s Future of Voting forum.
We are pleased to announce we will be unveiling our latest development–Scantegrity II– at this event.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.