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

In security engineering, 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 lose 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
more in the category of being unsolvable with current technology. This
is not just my opinion, but also shared by many security researchers
amogst them 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 to change
  votes and also emitted radio signals revealing how you voted.

\item Germany conducted pilot studies with e-voting, but in 2007 a law
  suit has reached the highest court and it rejected e-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 for voting in general 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. The reason is that you want to avoid vote selling as has
    been tried, for example, by a few jokers in the recent 
    Scottish referendum.    
  \end{itemize}
\item {\bf Voter Authentication}
  \begin{itemize}
  \item Only authorised voters can vote up to the permitted number of votes
    (in order to avoid the ``vote early, vote often'').
  \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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