Title:	Secure Voting Protocols

Speaker: Ben Adida, Harvard CRCS

Place: 	32-G531, Stata Center
Time: 	1-2:30 pm
Date: 	Friday, September 29, 2006

Abstract:

Secret-ballot elections present a particularly fascinating design
challenge: Alice would like assurance that her vote "made it" into the
tally, yet she must be kept safe from undue influence. Interestingly,
this means that Alice's ballot must remain secret, even against her
will. No common election technique, not even hand-counted paper ballots,
successfully reconciles these two requirements. Typically, in order to
achieve ballot secrecy, Alice loses the ability to directly verify the
election. She must trust elections officials to preserve and count the
ballots.

In this talk, we discuss the history of cryptographic voting, the only
known way to truly reconcile direct verifiability and ballot secrecy. We
review techniques for incoercible ballot casting and verifiable ballot
anonymization. We also consider public mixing, our new technique for
publicly verifiable anonymization.

(the novel portion of this talk is joint work with Douglas Wikstrom)