© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 1

Usability and Security Standards for Electronic Voting

IEEE Electronic Voting Workshop

Arnold B. UrkenProfessor of Political Science

Stevens Institute of TechnologyCastle Point on the HudsonHoboken, New Jersey 07030aurken@stevens-tech.edu

July 28, 2003

© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 2

Electronic Voting Standards Issues

Usability Plug and play scoring of votes is not simple Partisan groups should not control the

development of alternative scoring methods

Security “Absolute” privacy is not trustworthy

without active auditing Formal methods should be incorporated into

voting standards

© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 3

Usability: Plug and Play Scoring

Alternative scoring affects Auditing and verification Presentation of results Choice of aggregation criteria

“Majority” is not magic The probability of a tied outcome will

increase significantly under some methods

Conflicting definitions of majority must be resolved (e.g., approval voting)

© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 4

Usability: Partisan Issues

Scoring technology will enable communities to consider new options for organizing elections

Partisan interest groups should not be allowed to determine what is feasible

There is no “best” or optimal scoring method for elections

© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 5

Security: Privacy

Technology should be developed to enable desirable social practices to be implemented

Active auditing is needed to cope with benign and malicious error in data collection and server maintenance

Voluntary sharing of vote data is not “unthinkable”

© 2003 Arnold B. Urken. All Rights Reserved. 6

Security: Formal Methods

New ways of improving voting security Type-safe transactions

Prevent malicious/benign error Open up new options for verification

Model checking Create an election database: from registration

to election outcome Use model verification to detect random and

malicious errors in election processes