Voting systems require end-to-end trustworthiness, commencing with blank ballots and registration lists and concluding with the correct and auditable tallies of the marked ballots, reflecting the choices of the voters. This ballot round trip must resist well financed and organized adversaries that may include the very people who develop, maintain, or deploy the election machinery, and the process must be accessible to all citizens regardless of their disabilities or native language. The center's research investigates software architectures, tamper-resistant hardware, cryptographic protocols, and the role that various verification systems (e.g. paper, audio, cryptographic) can play in electronic voting systems. The center also examines system usability and studies how public policy and administrative procedures can, in combination with technology, better safeguard voting systems.
The voting system integrity problem is a paradigmatic hard Cyber Trust problem, requiring trustworthy system architectures, security, integrity, privacy, anonymity, high assurance, and human-machine interfaces. Voting systems must preserve a voter's privacy and anonymity, to reduce risks of voter coercion and bribery, yet they must be sufficiently auditable and transparent to allow for mistakes and errors to be identified and reconciled. This center's research develops a deeper understanding of how to organize, develop, and evaluate not only voting systems, but a wide range of other systems with end-to-end trustworthiness requirements.
ACCURATE (a center for correct, usable, reliable, auditable, and transparent elections) was conceived as a multidisciplinary effort, including experts in computer security, human factors (usability), and legal scholarship. Our goal was to improve the state of our nation’s election systems. Our work began as a reaction to the poor engineering of electronic voting systems which were increasingly being adopted in the U.S. as a response to problems with earlier punch-card and lever voting machines. Over the course of ACCURATE, we designed new techniques for voting systems to store and protect votes, even in the face of tampering or other strong threats that machines might face. We conducted usability studies, where we brought participants in from the surrounding community and measured how well different voting technologies were at accurately and efficiently capturing their intent. We examined legal contracts between counties and voting system vendors to understand the voting market. We offered testimony to a variety of government bodies (local, state, federal). We helped the states of California and Ohio conduct source code audits of their electronic voting systems. To better disseminate our work, we created a new research workshop in 2006 (EVT/WOTE) and a new journal in 2013 (JETS), which are now the premiere places to public election technology scholarship. Our work in voting turned out to have important applications elsewhere. For example, our work on secure storage of votes, based on cryptographic "hash chain" data structures, led us to generalize these structures and produce efficient cryptographic storage systems that can scale to much greater sizes. This led to applications in areas as diverse as building a distributed Twitter-style social network, or building a high-throughput digital signing system (done in collaboration with Google’s Wave project). In addition to our multidisciplinary research efforts, we have also taught multidisciplinary classes. Rice students taking this class got to experience a computer scientist (Wallach), a political scientist (Stein), and a psychologist (Byrne) share the teaching efforts. Students from these classes conducted research projects of their own, ranging from building software prototypes to conducting election exit polls. All of the research results and publications from ACCURATE are available on our web site (accurate-voting.org). Software that we produced, including the VoteBox voting system prototype (votebox.cs.rice.edu), are available online under an open source license.
