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\section*{Handout 2 (E-Voting)}

In security there are many counter-intuitive phenomena: for

example I am happy (more or less) to use online banking every

day, where if something goes wrong, I can potentially loose a

lot of money, but I am staunchly against using electronic

voting (lets call it e-voting for short). E-voting is an idea

that is nowadays often promoted in order to counter low

turnouts in elections\footnote{In my last local election where

I was eligible to vote only 48\% of the population have cast

their ballot. I was, I shamefully admit, one of the

non-voters.} and generally sounds like a good idea. Right?

Voting from the comfort of your own home, or on your mobile on

the go, what could possibly go wrong? Even the UK's head of

the Electoral Commission, Jenny Watson, argued in 2014 in a

Guardian article that the UK should have e-voting. Her

plausible argument is that 76\% of pensioners in the UK vote

(in a general election?), but only 44\% of the under-25s. For

which constituency politicians might therefore make more

favourable (short-term) decisions is clear. So being not yet 

pensioner, I should be in favour of e-voting, no?

Well, it turns out there are many things that can go wrong

with e-voting, as I like to argue in this handout. E-voting in

a ``secure way'' seems to be one of the things in computer

science that are still very much unsolved. It is not on the 

scale of Turing's halting problem, which is proved that it can 

never be solved in general, but it is unsolved with current 

technology. This is not just my opinion, but 

from shared by Alex Halderman, who is the world-expert on this

subject and from whose course on Securing Digital Democracy

I have most of my information and inspiration. It is also

a controversial topic in many countries:

\begin{itemize}

\item The Netherlands between 1997--2006 had electronic voting

      machines, but ``hacktivists'' had found they can be

      hacked and also emitted radio signals revealing how you

      voted.

\item Germany had used them in pilot studies, but in 2007 a

      law suit has reached the highest court and it rejected

      electronic voting on the grounds of not being

      understandable by the general public.

\item UK used optical scan voting systems in a few trail

      polls, but to my knowledge does not use any e-voting in

      elections. 

\item The US used mechanical machines since the 1930s, later

      punch cards, now DREs and optical scan voting machines.

\item Estonia used since 2007 the Internet for national

      elections. There were earlier pilot studies for voting

      via Internet in other countries.

\item India uses e-voting devices since at least 2003. They

      used ``keep-it-simple'' machines produced by a

      government owned company.

\item South Africa used software for its tallying in the 1993

      elections (when Nelson Mandela was elected)

      and found that the tallying software was

      rigged, but they were able to tally manually.      

\end{itemize}

The reason that e-voting is such a hard problem is that we

have requirements about the voting process that conflict with

each other. The five main requirements are:

\begin{itemize}

\item {\bf Integrity} 

  \begin{itemize}

  \item The outcome of the vote matches with the voters'

        intend.

  \item There might be gigantic sums at stake and need to be defended against.

  \end{itemize}

\item {\bf Ballot Secrecy}

  \begin{itemize}

  \item Nobody can find out how you voted.

  \item (Stronger) Even if you try, you cannot prove how you voted.

  \end{itemize}

\item {\bf Voter Authentication}

  \begin{itemize}

  \item Only authorised voters can vote up to the permitted number of votes.

  \end{itemize}

\item {\bf Enfranchisement}

  \begin{itemize}

  \item Authorised voters should have the opportunity to vote.

  \end{itemize}

\item {\bf Availability}

  \begin{itemize}

  \item The voting system should accept all authorised votes and produce results in a timely manner.

  \end{itemize}

\end{itemize}

To tackle the problem of e-voting, we must first have a look

into the history of voting and how paper-based ballots 

evolved. We know for sure that elections were held in Athens

as early as 600 BC, but might even date to the time of

Mesopotamia and also in India some kind of ``republics'' might 

have existed before the Alexander the Great invaded it.

Have a look at Wikipedia about the history of democracy for 

more information.

\subsubsection*{Questions}

Coming back to the question of why I use online banking, but 

prefer not to e-vote. 

Why do I use e-polling in lectures?

Imagine you have a perfectly secure internet voting system, by

which I mean nobody can tamper with or steal votes between

your browser and the central server responsible for vote

tallying. What can still go wrong with such a perfectly secure

voting system, which is prevented in traditional elections

with paper-based ballots?

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