In this course, you'll learn what every citizen should know about the security risks--and future potential — of electronic voting and Internet voting. We'll take a look at the past, present, and future of election technologies and explore the various spaces intersected by voting, including computer security, human factors, public policy, and more.
Criteria
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University of Michigan의 강좌에서
Securing Digital Democracy
105개의 평가
수업에서
New Technology and Policy
Lessons learned
강사 만나기
J. Alex HaldermanAssociate Professor
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Welcome back to Securing Digital Democracy.
Since computer scientists have had so many criticisms of electronic voting systems.
Some people have, have thought this was a very strange thing.
What were these, these high tech people thinking?
Were they suddenly Luddites? But what computer scientists and
researchers in the voting field know is that there are ways to use technology
well. And ways to use it poorly.
That there's some things technology can do securely and some things that's it's very
hard to make technology do securely. In this lecture, our focus is going to be
on some new ideas about how to use technology in the voting process in order
to make it more secure. I'm going to introduce a series of
technologies that have been developed by researchers in this field and give you an
idea of what the future of technology and voting might look like.
But before we begin, I'd like to talk for a few minutes about some of the criteria,
some of the desirable properties for voting systems that people in voting, in
voting research, in voting practice talk about all the time.
And when we're evaluating voting systems both old ones and new ones, it's important
to think about how well they meet these criteria.
The first property, and probably the, the most abstract one and the one we talk
about most, is the idea of transparency. People talk about the need for election
transparency in relation to things like DRE voting machines.
What we mean by transparency is the, the property that the voters can observe and
understand the election process. This is important for several reasons.
Transparency allows voters to observe and thereby understand why their votes are
being counted. It allows voters to understand what the
rules are. It allows them to make sure that election
officials are doing their jobs. For those reasons, we might propose a more
full definition of transparency. And this one comes from Joe Hall, which is
that, a fully transparent election system supports accountability as well as public
oversight comprehension and access to the entire voiting process.
Another extremely desirable property is what we call verifiability.
Verifiability means that voters have some means to convince themselves rationally
speaking, that the election outcome is correct without having to just blindly
trust that the technology is functioning correctly, or that the election
authorities are honest. An example of a voting system that has the
verifiability property might be paper ballots where people are free to go and
observe the counting process because then the voter can directly convince themselves
with their senses that the outcome is correct.
On the other hand, a system that is not verifiable is paperless DRE's.
Because in a paperless DRE, the only count of the votes is happening by black box
software in a way that, that people can't observe and where people just have to have
faith that the software is correct. Another important property is
auditability. And that means that the system has some
way that it can be manually checked after the election to ensure that the votes have
been counted properly. Optical scan voting has this property.
Because we have a set of, of paper ballots that we can spot check or recount to make
sure that the totals are correct. I'll talk more about auditing elections
later in this lecture. Finally a property that has been defined
with respect to software used in the voting process is an idea called software
independence. And this is an idea that was coined by
this man, Ron Rivest, who, for those security nerds in the audience, is an
American cryptographer who is the R in the RSA cryptosystem.
Ron's idea is that a voting system is software independent if an undetected
change or error in the software cannot possibly cause an undetectable change or
error in an election outcome. Now, this is a really powerful idea.
Because it allows us to distinguish between systems where we have no choice
but to blindly trust that the software is secure and correct.
And systems where we have some means of catching any, any problems or cheating
attempts that the software might be making.
And examples of systems that provide this property of software independence are,
are, optical scan systems and DREs with paper trails.
So long as we are catching any problems by auditing those paper ballots or paper
trails after the election. So I'll, I'll talk a little bit more about
software independence when we talk about auditing.
So those are some of the most desirable properties in elections.
Now let's see some ways that systems can provide these.
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