Host Institution:

Monash University

Title of Seminar:

Verifiable counting of encrypted votes

Speaker's Name:

Vanessa Teague

Speaker's Institution:

Melbourne University

Time and Date:

3pm Thursday 2 October, Seminar Room M345

Seminar Abstract:

Electronic voting could be more secure and transparent than paper-based voting, because recent advances in cryptography allow oters to verify that their vote is cast as they intended, included in he count, and tallied correctly, without compromising privacy. However, international research generally overlooks complex voting systems like Australia's, so Australian electoral authorities have had to resort to software systems that are not verifiable, and hence (arguably) not trustworthy.

There are many advantages to voting schemes in which voters rank all candidates in order, rather than just choosing their favourite. However, these schemes inherently suffer from a coercion problem when there are many candidates, because a coercer can demand a certain
permutation from a voter and then check whether that permutation appears during tallying.  In this paper, we solve this problem for the popular STV system (a.k.a. Australian Senate vote counting), by constructing an algorithm for the verifiable tallying of encrypted
votes.
This is joint work with Kim Ramchen and Lee Naish.

Seminar Convenor:

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AGR IT support:

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