Volume 1, Number 1 | USENIX

Authors of accepted papers for Volume 1, Number 1, presented their work August 12–13, 2013, at EVT/WOTE '13, which was co-located with the 22nd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '13). As part of our commitment to open access, this issue of the USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems (JETS), and the individual papers presented at the workshop, are free and openly accessible for download below.
Download JETS Volume 1, Number 1 (complete PDF)
Georgios Tsoukalas, Kostas Papadimitriou, and Panos Louridas, Greek Research and Education Network; Panayiotis Tsanakas, National Technical University of Athens
We present Zeus, a verifiable internet ballot casting and counting system based on Helios, in which encrypted votes are posted eponymously to a server, then are anonymized via cryptographic mixing, and finally are decrypted using multiple trustee keys. Zeus refines the original Helios workflow to address a variety of practical issues, such as usability, parallelization, varying election types, and tallying through a separate computing system. In rough numbers, in the first nine months of deployment, Zeus has been used in 60 elections, tallying a total of more than 12000 votes.
Susan Bell, Office of the Travis County Clerk; Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research; Michael D. Byrne, Rice University; Dana DeBeauvoir, Office of the Travis County Clerk; Bryce Eakin, Independent Researcher; Gail Fisher, Office of the Travis County Clerk; Philip Kortum, Rice University; Neal McBurnett, ElectionAudits; Julian Montoya and Michelle Parker, Office of the Travis County Clerk; Olivier Pereira, Université Catholique de Louvain; Philip B. Stark, University of California, Berkeley; Dan S. Wallach, Rice University; Michael Winn, Office of the Travis County Clerk
STAR-Vote is a collaboration between a number of academics and the Travis County (Austin), Texas elections office, which currently uses a DRE voting system and previously used an optical scan voting system. STAR-Vote represents a rare opportunity for a variety of sophisticated technologies, such as end-to-end cryptography and risk limiting audits, to be designed into a new voting system, from scratch, with a variety of real world constraints, such as election-day vote centers that must support thousands of ballot styles and run all day in the event of a power failure. This paper describes the current design of STAR-Vote which is now largely settled and whose development will soon begin.
Kristen K. Greene and Michael D. Byrne, Rice University; Stephen N. Goggin, University of California, Berkeley
Despite the importance of usability in ensuring election integrity, it remains an under-studied aspect of voting systems. Voting computers (a.k.a. DREs) offer the opportunity to present ballots to voters in novel ways, yet this space has not been systematically explored. We constructed a DRE that, unlike most commercial DREs, does not require voters to view every race, but instead starts at the “review screen” and lets voters directly navigate to races. This was compared with a more traditional, sequentially-navigated, DRE. The direct access navigation model had two effects, both of which were quite large. First, voters made omission (undervote) errors markedly more often. Second, voters who were free to choose who to vote for chose to vote in substantially fewer races. We also examined the relationship between the true error rate—which is not observable in real elections—and the residual vote rate, a measure of effectiveness commonly used for real elections. Replicating the findings of [Campbell and Byrne 2009a], the mean residual vote rate was close to the mean true error rate, but the correlation between these measures was low, suggesting a loose coupling between these two measures.
Morgan Llewellyn, IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca; Steve Schneider, University of Surrey; Zhe Xia, Wuhan University of Technology; Chris Culnane and James Heather, University of Surrey; Peter Y.A. Ryan, University of Luxembourg; Shriramkrishnan Srinivasan, University of Surrey
Proposals for a secure voting technology can involve new mechanisms or procedures designed to provide greater ballot secrecy or verifiability. These mechanisms may be justified on the technical level, but researchers and voting officials must also consider how voters will understand these technical details, and how understanding may affect interaction with the voting systems. In the context of verifiable voting, there is an additional impetus for this consideration as voters are provided with an additional choice; whether or not to verify their ballot. It is possible that differences in voter understanding of the voting technology or verification mechanism may drive differences in voter behaviour; particularly at the point of verification. In the event that voter understanding partially explains voter decisions to verify their ballot, then variance in voter understanding will lead to predictable differences in the way voters interact with the voting technology.This paper describes an experiment designed to test voters’ understanding of the ‘split ballot’, a particular mechanism at the heart of the secure voting system Prˆet `a Voter, used to provide both vote secrecy and voter verifiability. We used a controlled laboratory experiment in which voter behaviour in the experiment is dependent on their understanding of the secrecy mechanism for ballots. We found that a two-thirds majority of the participants expressed a confident comprehension of the secrecy of their ballot; indicating an appropriate level of understanding. Among the remaining third of participants, most exhibited a behaviour indicating a comprehension of the security mechanism, but were less confident in their understanding. A small number did not comprehend the system. We discuss the implications of this finding for the deployment of such voting systems.
Dalia Khader, Peter Y. A. Ryan, and Qiang Tang, Université du Luxembou