Instructor's notes - before lecture
Motivations for remote voting and E-voting
Short-term, pragmatic considerations
Convenience
Usability, accessibility, inclusion: e.g., people with disabilities
Boost voter turnout, participation?
Longer-term: enabler for continuous-participation democracy?
Liquid democracy
Online deliberative polls
Iterative collective wisdom-finding ala Venice doge elections
History of practical E-voting
Estonia
Switzerland
US (e.g., Voatz)
Voting stages
Forming/marking ballots
Casting ballots
Anonymizing ballots
Tallying ballots
Challenges
Authentication: ensure that only authorized voters can vote
Inclusion: ensure that all authorized voters can vote
Integrity: ensure correctness of result
Privacy: keep secret how you voted (and sometimes even whether you voted)
Coercion-resistance: vote privacy even if voter is “cooperating”
Transparency: ability to convince voters that the vote is correct
In-person electronic voting
Scantegrity
STAR-Vote
Remote electronic voting (e-voting or i-voting)
Estonia i-voting
Verifiability of cast vote, but server side just trusted
JCJ, Civitas: end-to-end verifiability
Votegral?
Blockchain voting
Lots of hype
Limited (sometimes no) privacy, no coercion-resistance
Technical elements
Vote encryption
Continuing challenge: long-term privacy, quantum computers
Shuffle proofs: cryptographic (e.g., Neff); cut-and-choose (Scantegrity)
Homomorphic encrypted computation, SMPC
Cast-as-intended proofs: code voting (Switzerland), Benaloh challenges