Open-audit cryptographic voting protocols enable the verification of election outcomes, independent of whether election officials or polling machines behave honestly. Many open-audit voting systems have been prototyped and deployed. The City of Takoma Park, MD held its 2009 and 2011 city elections using voting system Scantegrity. Systems with similar properties are being proposed for use in Victoria, Australia (the Pret a Voter system) and Travis County, Texas (the STAR-Vote system).
This project obtains rigorous results on the properties of in-person voting protocols'-in particular the Scantegrity, Pret a Voter and STAR-Vote protocols. It further examines the properties of classes of in-person protocols and the limits to their achievement of desirable properties. It thus improves our understanding of the security properties of voting systems that are being used in real governmental elections.
The project proposes new protocols where voters and virtual observers use a peer network of untrusted computational assistants to improve protocol properties. It provides a software library for the development of open-audit voting systems.
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