Award Abstract # 1049730
Reconciling Post-Election Auditing with the Secret Ballot

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: THE TRUSTEES OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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: FY 2010 = $170,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Edward Felten (Principal Investigator)
    felten@cs.princeton.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Princeton University
1 NASSAU HALL
PRINCETON
NJ  US  08544-2001
(609)258-3090
Sponsor Congressional District: 12
Primary Place of Performance: Princeton University
1 NASSAU HALL
PRINCETON
NJ  US  08544-2001
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
12
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): NJ1YPQXQG7U5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING
Primary Program Source: 01001011DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7916
Program Element Code(s): 7795
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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