NSF Org: |
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | August 7, 2010 |
Latest Amendment Date: | August 7, 2010 |
Award Number: | 1049730 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Samuel M. Weber
CNS Division Of Computer and Network Systems CSE Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr |
Start Date: | September 1, 2010 |
End Date: | August 31, 2012 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $170,000.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $170,000.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
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History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
1 NASSAU HALL PRINCETON NJ US 08544-2001 (609)258-3090 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
1 NASSAU HALL PRINCETON NJ US 08544-2001 |
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING |
Primary Program Source: |
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Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.070 |
ABSTRACT
A fundamental tension exists between transparency and privacy in electronic voting. Electoral transparency requires access to primary voter records, so observers can be sure that the election was run appropriately. Ballot privacy---keeping ballot contents separate from information that can identify the voter---is required to prevent coercion and vote-selling. If we discard either transparency or privacy, voting becomes much simpler: without transparency, ballots can be perfectly private; with no privacy requirement, elections can be perfectly transparent. The project aims to reconcile transparency with ballot privacy in electronic voting systems.
The project has several goals. The project is identifying legal and technical barriers to increased privacy, both in terms of fundamental limits and limits imposed by technology. The project is also identifying vulnerabilities enabled by the movement for increased electoral transparency, for example the practical risks of identifying ballots using voter marks and paper-fingerprinting. This enables research to design privacy-preserving methods for publishing artifacts of transparency, such as scanned ballot images. The project is examining the loss of ballot privacy intrinsic to various models of post-election audits, where the trend has been toward greater disclosure of records, which may implicate issues of ballot privacy. The project is creating process models of post-election audits to identify and compare ballot privacy leakage and developing methods to better determine how many ballots are truly in an audit batch, a crucial but overlooked element of the mathematics in post-election audits.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
We were unable to perform the work under this grant due to unexpected changes in personnel. At the time we applied for and received the award, we had sufficient personnel, but we lost two people unexpectedly and therefore were shorthanded. One graduate student died suddenly and another graduate student withdrew unexpectedly. As a result we did not have the necessary personnel to perform all planned projects. Rather than partially perform any project or try to rely on less qualified personnel, we thought it best to withdraw from this project entirely.
Accordingly, no work was performed under this project and all funds were returned to NSF.
After the period of this award had expired, we were able to resume work in the subject area of this award, though not with NSF funding. That future work focused on how best to ensure accuracy of elections in multi-level voting scenarios such as the Electoral College system that chooses the U.S. President. We developed methods to check the audit the accuracy of election records in the immediate aftermath of elections, taking into account the crucial role of "swing states" which make ballots in some states much more pivotal than others in determining the overall election outcome. By concentrating election integrity efforts in the most crucial states, we can achieve higher confidence in the election results at lower cost. Our future work provides a statistical model for doing this.
Last Modified: 06/28/2013
Modified by: Edward W Felten
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