Electronic Elections: Trust Through Engineering

Electronic voting technology is a two edged sword. It comes with many risks but brings also many benefits. Instead of flat out rejecting the technology as uncontrollably dangerous, we advocate in this paper a different technological angle that renders electronic elections trustworthy beyond the usual levels of doubt. We exploit the trust that voters currently have into the democratic process and model our techniques around that observation accordingly. In particular, we propose a technique of trace emitting computations to record the individual steps of an electronic voting machine for a posteriori validation on an acceptably small trusted computing base. Our technology enables us to prove that an electronic elections preserves the voter’s intent, assuming that the voting machine and the trace verifier are independent.