Workshop Program

Widespread concerns exist that new voting technologies invite electoral fraud. In states with a known record of electoral fraud, however, the use of new voting technologies may help reduce the incidence of fraud by automating parts of the voting and counting process. This study shows that the use of optical scan voting systems had a significant effect in terms of fraud reduction during the 2011 legislative election in Russia. This finding has implications for organizations and governments that seek to promote democratic elections in undemocratic states. 

We provide an analysis of voter and poll worker perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of a new e-voting system vis–à–vis traditional ballot-and-envelope voting in the 2011 election in Salta, Argentina. The results of this comparison provide new insights into how poll workers perceive the implementation of new voting technologies and show that both points of view need to be taken into account when assessing new election technology. We found that speed is perceived to be the most important advantage of e-voting; and more so for poll workers than for voters. This is not surprising since speed is an aspect of a voting technology that directly affects the workflow of poll workers. We also found that poll workers expressed more intensely negative attitudes towards e-voting than voters, especially in relation to difficulty of use and lack of training. Finally, we found that both voters and poll workers placed more importance on usability than confidence issues. This is an unexpected finding since election authorities have identified confidence in the integrity of the election process as the main trigger of the adoption of the new voting technology. Analyses like the one conducted in this paper should be an integral component of the evaluation of the implementation of new voting technologies and introduction of important procedural changes. 

This paper presents a new End-to-End (E2E) verifiable e-voting protocol for large-scale elections, called Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity (DRE-i). In contrast to all other E2E verifiable voting schemes, ours does not involve any Tallying Authorities (TAs). The design of DRE-i is based on the hypothesis that existing E2E voting protocols’ universal dependence on TAs is a key obstacle to their practical deployment. In DRE-i, the need for TAs is removed by applying novel encryption techniques such that after the election multiplying the ciphertexts together will cancel out random factors and permit anyone to verify the tally. We describe how to apply the DRE-i protocol to enforce the tallying integrity of a DRE-based election held at a set of supervised polling stations. Each DRE machine directly records votes just as the existing practice in the real-world DRE deployment. But unlike the ordinary DRE machines, in DRE-i the machine must publish additional audit data to allow public verification of the tally. If the machine attempts to cheat by altering either votes or audit data, then the public verification of the tallying integrity will fail. To improve system reliability, we further present a fail-safe mechanism to allow graceful recovery from the effect of missing or corrupted ballots in a publicly verifiable and privacy-preserving manner. Finally, we compare DRE-i with previous related voting schemes and show several improvements in security, efficiency and usability. This highlights the promising potential of a new category of voting systems that are E2E verifiable and TA-free. We call this new category “self-enforcing electronic voting”.

Dean Logan is the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk for Los Angeles County, California—the nation’s largest, most diverse and complex local election jurisdiction. In addition to serving as the ex officio Supervisor of Elections, the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk records real property documents; maintains vital records of births, deaths and marriages; issues marriage licenses; performs civil marriage ceremonies; and processes business filings and other documents for Los Angeles County; serving an estimated 3,500 customers daily.

Prior to relocating to Southern California, Mr. Logan served as Director of Records, Elections and Licensing Services in King County, Washington (metropolitan Seattle/Puget Sound), as the Washington State Elections Director and as the elected County Clerk in Kitsap County, Washington.

Currently, Mr. Logan serves on the Executive Board for the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials (CACEO) and the Pew Center on the States’ Voter Registration Modernization and Performance Index for Elections working groups. He is an active participant in the Future of California Elections collaborative; an initiative sponsored and funded by the James T. Irvine Foundation. Past work includes serving on the California Statewide Voter Registration System Advisory Committee and on the National Election Center’s Task Forces on Education & Training and Election Reform.

In 2007, Mr. Logan served as an international elections observer in Morocco on behalf of the National Democratic Institute (NDI). He is the recipient of the 2013 Los Angeles County Quality and Productivity Commission’s Chair Leadership Award and has been previously recognized for distinguished leadership by Sprint USA, the National Association of Community Leadership and the Election Verification Network.

Mr. Logan holds a degree in Organizational Leadership from Azusa Pacific University and earned an Executive Master of Public Administration degree through the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington. Additionally, he is an instructor for the Public Sector MPA program at California State University, Northridge.

Printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand is desirable both for convenience and security. It allows a polling station to serve numerous different ballots, and it avoids many problems associated with the custody of the printouts. This paper describes a new proposal for printing Prêt à Voter ballots on demand. The emphasis is on computational efficiency suitable for real elections, and on very general ballot types.