U.S. Vote Foundation has released a report on The Future of Voting: End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting Specification and Feasibility Assessment Study which analyses the current state of security and verifiability in Internet voting and makes concrete recommendations to make it more secure and transparent.
The authors’ premise is that public elections in the United States are a matter of national security. They consider it crucial that Internet voting systems be transparent and designed to run in a manner that embraces the constructs of end-to-end verifiability (E2E-V) – a property they say is missing from existing Internet voting systems.
Examining the viability of secure, open and transparent Internet elections drove the formation of E2E-VIV (Verifiable Internet Voting) project, which was led by the U.S. Vote Foundation through their Overseas Vote initiative, formerly known as Overseas Vote Foundation. Secure internet voting is not for tomorrow, according to the study, but things can be done to improve, if not yet to guarantee, E2E-V. The study makes specific recommendations with respect to voter privacy, the ability of the voter to check the correctness of the vote recorded and that the vote is included in the final tally, usability by all voters, and secure encryption.
According to Susan Dzieduszycka-Suinat, President and CEO, U.S. Vote Foundation, “Although it is not certain that a system meeting all of these requirements can be developed, or even that vendors who might claim to do so will stand their systems up to testing and certification, it is a path forward. …I have no doubt that these recommendations will act as a catalyst to an exciting new phase of research and development.”