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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 Alderman, 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?

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