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 collect, store, and protect votes, even in the face of tampering or other strong threats that machines might face. 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 research covered a range of issues related to voting. At the most practical level, we studied operations in several election jurisdictions and proposed new procedures the make elections more trustworthy. For example, California has an "auditing" procedure for elections where paper ballots are hand-counted in randomly-chosen precincts to ensure the accuracy of electronic counts. The integrity of this process depends on getting a number of details right. We devised a simple procedure where 10-sided dice are rolled in public to choose the precincts to be audited, and we worked out all of the details of how it should be done. This process is now in use in several California counties. We also developed new methods to protect votes stored on a an electronic voting machine during election day, methods to verify that voting machines will work properly on election day, and methods to audit (cross-check) after the fact that the technology worked correctly. This project was part of the National Science Foundation's Cyber Trust program, which is intended to bring the skills of investigators in different research areas to protecting our networked computer infrastructure from hostile attack. The project was to study voting as an example of a critical system that needs to be protected, and the center's work on voting turned out to have important applications elsewhere. All of the research results and publications from ACCURATE are available on our web site (accurate-voting.org). Software that we produced are available online under an open source license.
