talk: Verifiable Election Technologies, 1-2pm Fri. Oct 20

With traditional election technologies, voters have little choice but to trust that others will curate and count their votes properly. They must trust their local election officials; they must trust the equipment that they use and, by extension, the vendors who built and programmed the equipment; and they must trust numerous other individuals and processes of which they may not even be aware. Even with hand-counted paper ballots, individual voters can observe at most a tiny fraction of the process and must trust others to ensure that the election tallies are correct. We can do better.  This talk will show how "end-to-end verifiability" can be used in elections to enable voters to confirm for themselves that their votes have been accurately counted -- without having to trust any software, hardware, or personnel. This strategy is not just an academic exercise. Systems have been built and piloted in actual elections, and there is reason to be optimistic about broader deployments in the near future.

Josh Benaloh is the Senior Principal Cryptographer at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His 1987 doctoral dissertation, "Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections," introduced the use of homomorphic encryption to enable election verifiability, and he has published and spoken extensively on election technologies and systems. Dr. Benaloh is an author of numerous studies and reports including the 2015 U.S. Vote Foundation report on "The Future of Voting," the 2018 U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report "Securing the Vote -- Protecting American Democracy," and a 2022 report on the feasibility of Internet voting by the Goldman School of Public Policy of the University of California at Berkeley. He currently chairs the over 200-member Election Verification Network and is the principal designer of Microsoft's free, open-source ElectionGuard toolkit which is being used by numerous vendors to incorporate end-to-end verifiability into their election systems.

Host: Alan T. Sherman, sherman@umbc.edu, Support for this event was provided in part by the National Science Foundation under SFS grant DGE-1753681.