Electronic Voting Security – The Future of Elections is Available Today
In traditional elections, voters deposit or mail their ballots and then have no choice but to trust others to tally their votes correctly. They must trust election officials to properly curate and count their ballots, they must trust the equipment used for counting and the vendors of that equipment, and they must trust numerous other people and processes of which they are often unaware. We can do better. Verifiable election technologies can be built and used which allow voters to check for themselves that their votes have been accurately counted – without having to trust any software, hardware, or personnel whatsoever. Any tampering – both external and internal – can be detected by candidates, media, advocates, and even individual voters. This technology is available today.
Josh Benaloh is Senior Principal Cryptographer at Microsoft Research and an Affiliate Faculty Member of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, He earned his S.B. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and M.S., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University where his 1987 doctoral dissertation, Verifiable Secret-Ballot Elections, introduced the use of homomorphic encryption to enable end-to-end verifiable election technologies.
Dr. Benaloh’s numerous research publications in cryptography and voting have pioneered new technologies including the “cast or spoil” paradigm that brings voters into the election verification process with minimal burden. He has served on the program committees of dozens of cryptography and election-related conferences and workshops and is an author of the 2018 National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on the Future of Voting —Securing the Vote — Protecting American Democracy. Locally, Dr. Benaloh served eight years on the Sound Transit Citizen Oversight Panel and has authored numerous puzzles for Seattle-area puzzle events.