Putting the human back in voting protocols

Ryan, P; Peacock, T

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-04904-0_3

Putting the human back in voting protocols

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Peter Ryan, Thea Peacock

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Abstract

Cryptographic voting schemes strive to provide high assurance of accuracy and secrecy with minimal trust assumptions, in particular, avoiding the need to trust software, hardware, suppliers, officials etc. Ideally we would like to make a voting process as transparent as possible and so base our assurance purely on the vigilance of the electorate at large, via suitable cryptographic algorithms and protocols. However, it is important to recognize that election systems are above all socio-technical systems: they must be usable by the electorate at large. As a result, it may be necessary to trade-off technical perfection against simplicity and usability. We illustrate this tension via design decisions in the Prêt à Voter scheme. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.