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Every Vote Counts: Ensuring Integrity in Large-Scale DRE-based Electronic Voting

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Feng Hao

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Abstract

This paper presents a new electronic voting system, called Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity (DRE-i). The DRE is a widely deployed voting system that commonly uses touch-screen technology to directly record votes. However, a lack of tallying integrity is widely considered the most contentious problem with the DRE system. In this work, we take a broad interpretation of the DRE: which includes not only touch-screen machines, as deployed at polling stations, but also remote voting systems conducted over the Internet or mobile phones. In all cases, the system records votes directly. The DRE-i protocol is generic for both on-site and remote voting and provides a drop-in mathematical solution to ensure tallying integrity without altering the user's intuitive voting experience. The auditing is voter-initiated, so every voter can verify that the machine counts votes correctly. As we adopt a novel technique to encrypt votes, the system is self-tallying: that is anyone can tally votes without any tallying authority involvement. To our best knowledge, our proposal is the first centralized e-voting system that is self-tallying. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this new design.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Hao F, Kreeger MN

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 2011

Pages: 13

Print publication date: 01/08/2011

Source Publication Date: August 2011

Report Number: 1268

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne


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