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No More Excuses: Automated Synthesis of Practical and Verifiable Vote-Counting Programs for Complex Voting Schemes

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Electronic Voting (E-Vote-ID 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 10615))

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Abstract

We argue that electronic vote-counting software can engender broad-based public trust in elections to public office only if they are formally verified against their legal definition and only if they can produce an easily verifiable certificate for the correctness of the count. We then show that both are achievable for the Schulze method of vote-counting, even when the election involves millions of ballots. We argue that our methodology is applicable to any vote-counting scheme that is rigorously specified. Consequently, the current practice of using unverified and unverifiable vote counting software for elections to public office is untenable. In particular, proprietary closed source vote-counting software is simply inexcusable.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Law, UNSW, Sydney, Australia

    Lyria Bennett Moses

  2. Research School of Computer Science, ANU, Canberra, Australia

    Rajeev Goré, Dirk Pattinson & Mukesh Tiwari

  3. College of Law, ANU, Canberra, Australia

    Ron Levy

Authors
  1. Lyria Bennett Moses
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  2. Rajeev Goré
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  3. Ron Levy
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  4. Dirk Pattinson
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  5. Mukesh Tiwari
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dirk Pattinson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia

    Robert Krimmer

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Melanie Volkamer

  3. German Research Institute for Public Administration, Speyer, Germany

    Nadja Braun Binder

  4. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Norbert Kersting

  5. Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgium

    Olivier Pereira

  6. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Carsten Schürmann

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Bennett Moses, L., Goré, R., Levy, R., Pattinson, D., Tiwari, M. (2017). No More Excuses: Automated Synthesis of Practical and Verifiable Vote-Counting Programs for Complex Voting Schemes. In: Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Braun Binder, N., Kersting, N., Pereira, O., Schürmann, C. (eds) Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10615. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-68686-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-68687-5

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