With the recent quadrennial instantiation of the US presidential election, discussions of election security have predictably resurged across much of the world. Indeed, news cycles in the US, UK, and EU abound with talking points surrounding the security of elections. In light of this context, we will use this week’s Three Paper Thursday to shed light on the technical challenges, solutions, and opportunities in designing secure election systems.

This post will focus on the technical security of election systems. That said, the topic of voter manipulation techniques such as disinformation campaigns, although out of scope here, is also an open area of research.

At first glance, voting may not seem like a challenging problem. If we are to consider a simple majority vote, surely a group of young schoolchildren could reach a consensus in minutes via hand-raising. Striving for more efficient vote tallying, though, perhaps we may opt to follow the IETF in consensus through humming. As we seek a solution that can scale to large numbers of voters, practical limitations will force us to select a multi-location, asynchronous process. Whether we choose in-person polling stations or mail-in voting, challenges quickly develop: how do we know a particular vote was counted, its contents kept secret, and the final tally correct?

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (U.S.), Ed., Securing the vote: protecting American democracy, The National Academies Press (2018)

The first paper is particularly prominent due to its unified, no-nonsense, and thorough analysis. The report is specific to the United States, but its key themes apply generally. Written in response to accusations of international interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the National Academies provide 41 recommendations to strengthen the US election system.

These recommendations are extremely straightforward, and as such a reminder that adversaries most often penetrate large systems by targeting the “weakest link.” Among other things, the authors recommend creating standardized ballot data formats, regularly validating voter registration lists, evaluating the accessibility of ballot formats, ensuring access to absentee ballots, conducting appropriate audits, and providing adequate funding for elections.

It’s important to get the basics right. While there are many complex, stimulating proposals that utilize cutting-edge algorithms, cryptography, and distributed systems techniques to strengthen elections, many of these proposals are moot if the basic logistics are mishandled.

Some of these low-tech recommendations are, to the surprise of many passionate technologists, quite common among election security specialists. For example, requiring a paper ballot trail and avoiding internet voting based on current technology is also cited in our next paper.

Matthew Bernhard et al., Public Evidence from Secret Ballots, arXiv:1707.08619 (2017)

Governance aside, the second paper offers a comprehensive survey of the key technical challenges in election security and common tools used to solve them. The paper motivates the difficulty of election systems by attesting that all actors involved in an election are mutually distrustful, meaningful election results require evidence, and voters require ballot secrecy.

Ballot secrecy is more than a nicety; it is key to a properly functioning election system. Implemented correctly, ballot secrecy prevents voter coercion. If a voter’s ballot is not secret, or indeed if there is any way a voter can post-facto prove the casting a certain vote, malicious actors may pressure the voter to provide proof that they voted as directed. This can be insidiously difficult to prevent if not considered thoroughly.

Bernhard et al. discuss risk-limiting audits (RLAs) as an efficient yet powerful way to limit uncertainty in election results. By sampling and recounting a subset of votes, RLAs enable the use of statistical methods to increase confidence in a correct ballot count. Employed properly, RLAs can enable the high-probability validation of election tallies with effort inversely proportional to the expected margin. RLAs are now being used in real-world elections, and many RLA techniques exist in practice. 

Refreshingly, this paper establishes that blockchain-based voting is a bad idea. Blockchains inherently lack a central authority, so enforcing election rules would be a challenge. Furthermore, a computationally powerful adversary could control which votes get counted.

The paper also discusses high-level cryptographic tools that can be useful in elections. This leads us to our third and final paper.

Josh Benaloh, ElectionGuard Specification v0.95, Microsoft GitHub (2020)

Our final paper is slightly different from the others in this series; it’s a snapshot of a formal specification that is actively being developed, largely based on the author’s 1996 Yale doctoral thesis.

The specification describes ElectionGuard, a system being built by Microsoft to enable verifiable election results (disclaimer: the author of this post holds a Microsoft affiliation). It uses a combination of exponential ElGamal additively-homomorphic encryption, zero knowledge proofs, and Shamir’s secret sharing to conduct publicly-verifiable, secret-ballot elections.

When a voter casts a ballot, they are given a tracking code which can be used to verify the counting of the ballot’s votes via cryptographic proofs published with the final tally. Voters can achieve high confidence that their ballot represents a proper encryption of their desired votes by optionally spoiling an unlimited number of ballots – triggering a decryption of the spoiled ballot – at the time of voting. Encrypted ballots are homomorphically tallied in encrypted form by the election authorities, and the number of authorities that participate in tallying must meet the threshold set for the election to protect against malicious authorities.

The specification does not require that the system be used for exclusively internet-based or polling station-based elections; rather it is a framework for users to consume as they wish. Indeed, one of the draws to ElectionGuard is that it does not mandate a specific UI, ballot marking device, or even API. This flexibility allows election authorities to leverage the system in the manner that best fits their jurisdiction. The open source implementation can be found on GitHub.

There are many pieces of voting software available, but ElectionGuard is the new kid on the block that addresses many of the concerns raised in our earlier papers.

Key Themes

Designing secure election systems is difficult.

Often, election systems fall short on the basics; improper voting lists, postage issues, and poorly formatted ballots can disrupt elections as much as some adversaries. Ensuring that the foundational components of an election are handled well currently involves seemingly mundane – but important – things such as paper ballot trails, chains of custody, and voter ID verification.

High-tech election proposals are not new; indeed key insights into the use of cryptographic techniques in elections were being discussed in the academic literature well over two decades ago. That said, in recent years there has been an ostensibly increased investment in implementing cryptographic election systems, and although there remain many problems to be solved the future in this area looks promising.