Voting systems require end-to-end trustworthiness, commencing with blank ballots and registration lists and concluding with the correct and auditable tallies of the marked ballots, reflecting the choices of the voters. This ballot round trip must resist well financed and organized adversaries that may include the very people who develop, maintain, or deploy the election machinery, and the process must be accessible to all citizens regardless of their disabilities or native language. The center's research investigates software architectures, tamper-resistant hardware, cryptographic protocols, and the role that various verification systems (e.g. paper, audio, cryptographic) can play in electronic voting systems. The center also examines system usability and studies how public policy and administrative procedures can, in combination with technology, better safeguard voting systems. The voting system integrity problem is a paradigmatic hard Cyber Trust problem, requiring trustworthy system architectures, security, integrity, privacy, anonymity, high assurance, and human-machine interfaces. Voting systems must preserve a voter's privacy and anonymity, to reduce risks of voter coercion and bribery, yet they must be sufficiently auditable and transparent to allow for mistakes and errors to be identified and reconciled. This center's research develops a deeper understanding of how to organize, develop, and evaluate not only voting systems, but a wide range of other systems with end-to-end trustworthiness requirements.
Collaborative Research: CT-CS: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE)