TY - JOUR
T1 - State-wide elections, optical scan voting systems, and the pursuit of integrity
AU - Antonyan, Tigran
AU - Davtyan, Seda
AU - Kentros, Sotirios
AU - Kiayias, Aggelos
AU - Michel, Laurent
AU - Nicolaou, Nicolas
AU - Russell, Alexander
AU - Shvartsman, Alexander A.
N1 - Funding Information:
Mr. Kentros has been the recipient of a scolarship from the State Scolarship Foundation of Greece.
Funding Information:
Dr. Kiayias has been the recipient of an NSF Career award and a Fulbright fellowship.
Funding Information:
He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT. He is the head of the Crypto-DRM Laboratory that is dedicated to the study of the cryptographic aspects of copyright technologies and digital rights management (DRM) systems. His research has been funded by a number of agencies including, NSF, DoD, DHS and NIST.
Funding Information:
Manuscript received February 23, 2009; revised August 24, 2009. First published September 29, 2009; current version published November 18, 2009. This work was supported by the Secretary of the State of Connecticut. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Aviel D. Rubin.
PY - 2009/12
Y1 - 2009/12
N2 - In recent years, two distinct electronic voting technologies have been introduced and extensively utilized in election procedures: direct recording electronic systems and optical scan (OS) systems. The latter are typically deemed safer, as they inherently provide a voter-verifiable paper trail that enables hand-counted audits and recounts that rely on direct voter input. For this reason, OS machines have been widely deployed in the United States. Despite the growing popularity of these machines, they are known to suffer from various security vulnerabilities that, if left unchecked, can compromise the integrity of elections in which the machines are used. This article studies general auditing procedures designed to enhance the integrity of elections conducted with optical scan equipment and, additionally, describes the specific auditing procedures currently in place in the State of Connecticut. We present an abstract view of a typical OS voting technology and its relationship to the general election process. With this in place, we lay down a "temporal- resource" adversarial model, providing a simple language for describing the disruptive power of a potential adversary. Finally, we identify how audit procedures, injected at various critical stages before, during, and after an election, can frustrate such adversarial interference and so contribute to election integrity. We present the implementation of such auditing procedures for elections in the State of Connecticut utilizing the Premiere (Diebold) AccuVote OS; these audits were conducted by the UConn VoTeR Center, at the University of Connecticut, on request of the Office of the Secretary of the State. We discuss the effectiveness of such procedures in every stage of the process and we present results and observations gathered from the analysis of past election data.
AB - In recent years, two distinct electronic voting technologies have been introduced and extensively utilized in election procedures: direct recording electronic systems and optical scan (OS) systems. The latter are typically deemed safer, as they inherently provide a voter-verifiable paper trail that enables hand-counted audits and recounts that rely on direct voter input. For this reason, OS machines have been widely deployed in the United States. Despite the growing popularity of these machines, they are known to suffer from various security vulnerabilities that, if left unchecked, can compromise the integrity of elections in which the machines are used. This article studies general auditing procedures designed to enhance the integrity of elections conducted with optical scan equipment and, additionally, describes the specific auditing procedures currently in place in the State of Connecticut. We present an abstract view of a typical OS voting technology and its relationship to the general election process. With this in place, we lay down a "temporal- resource" adversarial model, providing a simple language for describing the disruptive power of a potential adversary. Finally, we identify how audit procedures, injected at various critical stages before, during, and after an election, can frustrate such adversarial interference and so contribute to election integrity. We present the implementation of such auditing procedures for elections in the State of Connecticut utilizing the Premiere (Diebold) AccuVote OS; these audits were conducted by the UConn VoTeR Center, at the University of Connecticut, on request of the Office of the Secretary of the State. We discuss the effectiveness of such procedures in every stage of the process and we present results and observations gathered from the analysis of past election data.
KW - Audit
KW - Election
KW - Electronic voting
KW - Optical scan (OS)
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U2 - 10.1109/TIFS.2009.2033232
DO - 10.1109/TIFS.2009.2033232
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:70450225784
SN - 1556-6013
VL - 4
SP - 597
EP - 610
JO - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
JF - IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
IS - 4
M1 - 5272308
ER -