Design and development of a verifiable voting system for the Victorian Electoral Commission, Australia

This project provides the design and associated development of a verifiable voting system, based on the principles of the original Pret a Voter system, to enable secure electronic voting in the state of Victoria, Australia. The aim is to provide a system using electronic ballot markers so that voters can construct their votes electronically, and then upload them to the system in a verifiable way. The system provides 'end-to-end verifiability' voters obtain cryptographically signed receipts of their votes so they can later check that the votes have been included in the tally and not altered or discarded, and the processing and tallying of the votes is done in a publicly verifiable way so that independent auditors can check that it has been done correctly. The application of the original design idea to its use in a real election gives rise to new research challenges and the need to develop new security protocols and algorithms.

Electronic voting in Victoria is motivated by the need for accessibility, and to support long distance out-of-state voting and voters for whom English is not their first language. The particular engineering challenges and security concerns associated with electronic voting have motivated the use of a highly secure and voter-verifiable system to provide the necessary guarantees in the integrity of the resulting election and the privacy of the votes.