Research and analysis on voting schemes
and voting technology
Since 2000, I have been following the evolution of electronic voting: I considered
it a very interesting and difficult problem, and it was often connected to Free and
Open Source Software issues by some authors, that claimed that every e-voting
system must be implemented as an open source system.
This page provides a few pointers to my opinions, and some scientific work, on these
issues.
- 2007, April 10. My first scientific work on this subject is online.
On privacy and anonymity in electronic and non electronic voting: the ballot-as-signature attack.
A wealth of protocols for electronic voting have been proposed in the literature
over the past years. What makes these protocols difficult to conceive and verify
is one fundamental property, anonymity, which is of paramount importance in the
real world, in particular when performing actual political
elections. Historically, certain techniques have been used in actual elections
to nullify anonymity and effectively coerce voters, by exploiting an evident
weakness in many voting protocols; these techniques were used in traditional
elections well before the notion of electronic voting was even proposed, yet,
they still seem to be little known: as a consequence, we find recent proposals
of voting protocols that can easily be attacked this way, like Rivest's
ThreeBallot scheme, or clever attempts at formal definitions of privacy and
anonymity properties that would not rule out such flawed protocols. In this
paper, we describe one old technique, effectively used in Italy over twenty
years ago, and show how the flaws or incompleteness in current protocols and
formalization can be clearly exposed just through that simple idea. We also show
how this very same simple attack can be effectively used today on US-style
elections, regardless of the presence of a VVPB or VVPT. We hope that a wide
circulation of this simple ideas will help design better protocols and
formalization in the near future.
- 2007, April 24. Opinion on "le Journal du Net"
- 2007, April 16. Weblog entry on e-vote
- 2007, February 13. Weblog entry on e-vote
- 2006, October. Letter sent to several mayors in France that were considering going the e-vote way
- 2004, October. Article in the SPECIF bulletin (SPECIF is a French associations of computer science researchers and teachers)
