An information-theoretic model of voting systems

This paper presents an information-theoretic model of a vote counting system, and well-defined criteria for evaluating such a system with respect to integrity, privacy and verifiability. The impossibility of achieving perfect integrity, perfect verifiability and perfect privacy follows easily from the information-theoretic approach. The model is applied to the measurement of privacy loss in the ThreeBallot and Farnel voting systems, and finds both systems to have similar privacy loss.

[1]  Douglas W. Jones.  Threats to Voting Systems , 2005 .

[2]  G. G. Stokes.  "J." , 1890, The New Yale Book of Quotations.

[3]  Marek Klonowski,et al.  Rapid Mixing and Security of Chaum's Visual Electronic Voting , 2003, ESORICS.

[4]  David Chaum,et al.  Secret Ballot Elections with Unconditional Integrity , 2007, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[5]  Warren D. Smith.  Three Voting Protocols: ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin , 2007, EVT.

[6]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[7]  Charu C. Aggarwal,et al.  On the design and quantification of privacy preserving data mining algorithms , 2001, PODS.

[8]  Thomas M. Cover,et al.  Elements of Information Theory , 2005 .

[9]  David Chaum,et al.  Untraceable electronic mail, return addresses, and digital pseudonyms , 1981, CACM.

[10]  Alexandre V. Evfimievski,et al.  Limiting privacy breaches in privacy preserving data mining , 2003, PODS.

[11]  Jeremy Clark,et al.  On the Security of Ballot Receipts in E 2 E Voting Systems , 2007 .

[12]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  Self-tallying Elections and Perfect Ballot Secrecy , 2002, Public Key Cryptography.

[13]  Michael D. Byrne,et al.  Now Do Voters Notice Review Screen Anomalies? A Look at Voting System Usability , 2009, EVT/WOTE.

[14]  Peter Y. A. Ryan,et al.  A variant of the Chaum voter-verifiable scheme , 2005, WITS '05.

[15]  Allan C. Eustis.  Developing an Analysis of Threats to Voting Systems: Workshop Summary | NIST , 2005 .

[16]  David Chaum,et al.  A Practical Voter-Verifiable Election Scheme , 2005, ESORICS.

[17]  Markus Jakobsson,et al.  Making Mix Nets Robust for Electronic Voting by Randomized Partial Checking , 2002, USENIX Security Symposium.

[18]  尚弘 島影.  National Institute of Standards and Technologyにおける超伝導研究及び生活 , 2001 .

[19]  Andrew Chi-Chih Yao,et al.  Theory and application of trapdoor functions , 1982, 23rd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1982).

[20]  Bart Preneel,et al.  Towards Measuring Anonymity , 2002, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[21]  C. Andrew Neff,et al.  Election Confidence A Comparison of Methodologies and Their Relative Effectiveness at Achieving It , 2003 .

[22]  Poorvi L. Vora.  An Information-Theoretic Approach to Inference Attacks on Random Data Perturbation and a Related Privacy Measure , 2007, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[23]  Stefan Popoveniuc,et al.  An Introduction to PunchScan , 2010, Towards Trustworthy Elections.

[24]  Andrew Chi-Chih Yao,et al.  Theory and Applications of Trapdoor Functions (Extended Abstract) , 1982, FOCS.

[25]  David A. Wagner,et al.  Towards a privacy measurement criterion for voting systems , 2005, DG.O.

[26]  George Danezis,et al.  Towards an Information Theoretic Metric for Anonymity , 2002, Privacy Enhancing Technologies.

[27]  Safevote.  Voting System Requirements , .