Scantegrity II in EVT 2008 July 11, 2008
Posted by Richard Carback in : Concepts in E2E, Privacy, Security, Voting Events , add a commentWe will be presenting Scantegrity II at the 2008 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop. Here’s the abstract of our paper:
Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes
by David Chaum, Richard Carback, Jeremy Clark, Aleksander Essex, Stefan Popoveniuc, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Emily Shen, and Alan T. Sherman
We introduce Scantegrity II, a practical enhancement for optical scan voting systems that achieves increased election integrity through the novel use of confirmation codes
printed on ballots in invisible ink. Voters mark ballots just as in conventional optical scan but using a special pen that develops the invisible ink. Verifiability of election integrity is end-to-end, allowing voters to check that their votes are correctly included (without revealing their votes) and allowing anyone to check that the tally is computed correctly from the included votes. Unlike in the original Scantegrity, dispute resolution neither relies on paper chits nor requires election officials to recover particular ballot forms. Scantegrity II works with either precinct-based or central scan systems. The basic system has been implemented in open-source Java with off-the-shelf printing equipment and has been tested in a small election.An enhancement to Scantegrity II keeps ballot identification and other unique information that is revealed to the voter in the booth from being learned by persons other than the voter. This modification achieves privacy that is essentially equivalent to that of ordinary paper ballot systems, allowing manual counting and recounting of ballots.
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.
Rivest announces Scantegrity collaboration in RSA08 keynote May 2, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex and Richard Carback in : Voting Events, Voting Policy , add a commentIn the cryptographer’s panel discussion last month at RSA 2008, Ron Rivest took the opportunity to relate his recent work in voting and announced his collaboration with David Chaum and the Punchscan team in an upcoming paper presenting Scantegrity II (invisible ink). Rivest goes on to discuss the ongoing EAC VVSG comment period as well as the notion of ’software independence’ in voting machines.
Watch the video of his discussion of voting HERE beginning at 17′:00″. This video also contains excellent discussion from crypto all-stars Diffie, Hellman and Shamir.
In related news you’ll be able to read about Scantegrity (aka “Scantegrity I”) in the upcoming May/June edition of IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine
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.
OCLUG Mock Election April 7, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex in : Elections, Voting Events , add a commentOur friends at the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group kindly invited Rick and I to give a talk at their annual general meeting in which we demonstrated Scantegrity II. We conducted a mock election of their board of directors in part to demonstrate our invisible ink printing capability as well as to gather some preliminary feedback about the voting experience.
Their response seems promising. Though not a statistically significant sample, all survey respondees indicated they were “confident that I filled out my ballot correctly.” This obviously cannot be taken as an indication of overall usability. I do however think it demonstrates at least that we’ve moved past the usability restrictions of the Punchscan ballot and are on to other topics of discussion.
Also of note was that most respondees would consider using (and/or authoring) an open source software tool for the cryptographic integrity check. I think this is the more academically interesting question. The voting process itself is a bare minimum in terms of overall usability requirements. However it is the people performing the E2E verification steps that give this technology its raison d’être, so we’d hope they would be reasonably able to understand the purpose of, and use, the receipt check/audit tools.
Photos of the event can be seen here.
Aleks and Rick speaking at the OCLUG AGM. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)
Voting with Scantegrity II. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)
Invisible ink print setup: Off-the-shelf inkjet printer, continuous-feed ink system (for bulk specialty invisible ink).
A marked OCLUG mock ballot showing confirmation codes and voter generated receipt.
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 March 13, 2008
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.