Trust and Trustworthiness in Voting Systems

The speaker will discuss that challenges of constructing voting systems that guarantee the accuracy of the outcome while ensuring ballot secrecy. He will present some cryptographic schemes that provide such assurance with minimal dependance on the correct behaviour of officials, hardware or software. Instead, the assurance is based on maximal transparency, consistent with the secrecy requirements. In particular the speaker will outline the polling station scheme Pret a Voter and the internet scheme Pretty Good Democracy. Such schemes are arguably highly trustworthy. The challenge remains to ensure that they are also trusted by the relevant stakeholders: the voters, voting officials, politicians.