Electronic Voting Technologies Workshop 2007

Verification-Centric Realization of Electronic Vote Counting

This was the only paper at EVT to discuss formal methods, with mixed reaction. Several cryptographers suggested that a list of votes cast could be made public (in encrypted form) to allow each candidate/party to count the votes for themselves. I was asked to explain PRSTV in more detail. Also, some cryptographers suggested that is better to verify the result with independent counts rather than to verify the count process or the software. At present in the Irish paper based system, ballots are not made public, only the number of votes held by each candidate in each round and the proportion of transfers in each round. It was suggested that randomization, which is part of PSTRV, could be done in advance with a predefined table of random numbers. However, this could compromise the anonymity of the votes.