Electronic elections provide both benefits and risks that must be balanced. The benefits include modernizing democratic processes to attract younger voters and increase turnout, as well as reducing costs. However, risks include erosion of voter trust if the technology is not properly designed and implemented. Ensuring software independence and accountability through techniques like cryptography and programming language design is important to establish trustworthiness. With careful attention to usability, security and openness, electronic voting could eventually gain voter trust while preserving democratic principles.

1. Benefits and Risks
of
Electronic Elections
Carsten Schürmann
IT University of Copenhagen

3. Electronic Elections
Diebold AccuVote-TS
Privacy? Correctness?
[Di Franco, Petro, Shear, Vladimirov 2001]

4. Trust Trustworthiness
• Personal perception • Property of the process
– Accurate vote – Design
– Representative vote – Implementation
• Justifications • Reasons
– Secrecy – Physical properties of
– Collective tallying vote casting space
– Possibility to recount – Strict rules
– Stabilized election – Rigorous enforcement
process – Self policing tallying
– Official polling stations – Physical nature of votes

5. Hypothesis
It is possible to modernize
the electoral process, while balancing
the trust of the people on the
trustworthiness of the deployed
technology
[DemTech Proposal, submitted]

6. Risk #1: Erosion of Trust of Voters
Daniel Fischer, Memento (1995)
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh

7. Risk #2: What Does the Machine Do?

8. Risk #3: No Small Change

9. Risk #4: Technology
800 000 000
transistors
86 000 000
lines of code

10. Don’t fix it if it ain’t
broken
?

11. Benefit #1: Modernize the
Democratic Process
Attractive for younger
generations
Promises higher voter
turnout
New opportunities for
the handicapped

12. Benefit #2: Economic Incentives
Cheaper elections?
Anticipate challenges in
staffing polling stations
Ideally more precise,
faster results

13. Can we afford not to
do it
?

14. The Situation in Denmark
• Denmark to allow an internet election for the
meninghedsråd in 2008
• Ministry of Interior disallows use/test of
electronic equipment for municipal elections in
2008
• Internet elections for Ældreråd, Integrationsråd,
Ungdomsvalg, Frederiksberg, since 2004
• Several municipalities show renewed interest in
electronic voting equipment in 2010

15. Understanding Trust
Coleman. Foundations of Social Theory ’95

16. Naive Automation

17. Software Independence
A voting system is software-independent if an
undetected change or error in its software
cannot cause an undetectable change or error
in an election outcome.
Rivest, Ron and Wack, John (2006) On
the notion of "software independence"
in voting systems

18. “State of the Art”
The vote casting device is a computer, but not a general
purpose one. It, and its software, should be as
absolutely simple as possible. It should not be nearly as
complex as a standard PC, for example. It needs only a
touch screen, a slow processor and bus, minimal
working RAM, and only one or two kinds of I/O port
(e.g. serial, USB, or PCMCIA); it needs no rotating
storage devices, no network card, no sound card
(except for units for the handicapped), no advanced
graphics, and no clock, no keyboard, and no mouse.
[Bruck, Jeffersen, Rivest, 2001]

19. Accountability
• Information Security
• Programming Language
Technology
• Cryptography

20. Accountability

22. A Successful Election
• University Board Election 2007
• 1000 Students eligible
• 70 voters
• One election maschine
• Detailed study about the the trust perception
among the voters
[Lewinsky, Selsøe Sørensen,
2008]

23. Conclusion
• Denmark has a well-working democratic process
• Electronic elections will come
• Information Technology/Computer Science has
an enormous socio-technological responsibility
• I am convinced that we can build something
– that is trustworthy by design
– and eventually trusted by the voters
• It is going to be a challenge to do it right