Security Challenges for Democratic Elections

The International Cybersecurity Center of Excellence is hosting four short talks on Security Challenges for Democratic Elections on September 11, 2024 from 7am to 8:30am via Zoom. 

VoteXX: Extreme Coercion Resistance, Alan Sherman, UMBC

We solve a long-standing challenge to the integrity of votes cast without the supervision of a voting booth: “improper influence,” which we define as any combination of vote buying and voter coercion. In comparison with previous proposals, our system is the first in the literature to protect against a strong adversary who learns all the voter's keys- --we call this property “extreme coercion resistance.” When keys are stolen, each voter, or their trusted agents (which we call “hedgehogs”), may “nullify'” (effectively cancel) their vote in a way that is unstoppable and irrevocable and such that the nullification action is forever unattributable to that voter or their hedgehog(s). We demonstrate the security of our VoteXX system in the universal composability model. In comparison with previous proposals, our system offers some protection against even the strongest adversary who learns all keys. Other coercion-resistant protocols either do not address these attacks, place strong limitations on adversarial abilities, or rely on fully trusted parties to assist voters with their keys.

Verifiable Voting in the Wild, Steve Schneider, University of Surrey, UK

Verifiability in electronic voting systems is an approach to enabling checking of the election results independently of the system used to capture and process the votes.  There have been numerous proposals in the literature for electronic voting systems designed to include verifiability, generally underpinned by cryptographic mechanisms.  These typically enable voters to confirm that their vote has been captured as cast and enable observers (including the voters themselves) to verify that the votes have been counted and tallied correctly from the cast votes. The need to simultaneously ensure other requirements, such as ballot privacy and coercion-resistance, leads to voting ceremonies that can be intricate and place an additional burden on voters.  This talk will describe the trial deployment of two such systems in the wild: the vVote polling place system based around Pret a Voter; and the VMV (Verify My Vote) internet voting system based around Selene. We will discuss voters’ reactions to the systems in terms of their usability and comprehensibility and consider the implications for verifiability and associated protocols in practice.

Misinformation, misperception, and the 2024 election, David Lazer, Northeastern University

This talk will evaluate the potential threats to the 2024 election. The information environment has continued to rapidly change, and with those changes come new potential vulnerabilities to the integrity of the 2024 election. This talk will examine lessons from the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as examine some early findings regarding misinformation in the aftermath of the assassination attempt of Donald Trump.

Overseas voting reform in Japan, Yuasa Harumichi, Meiji University

Overseas voting is an important system for guaranteeing the voting rights of citizens living abroad. However, in Japan, only postal voting or voting at an embassy is permitted.  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused problems such as delays to postal voting and the inability to visit embassies due to lockdowns. A method has been proposed in which voters living abroad can vote via the internet using their My Number card. In addition, we will introduce some of the problems in Japan related to elections and the internet.