PhD student shoots down voting ducks
Thursday 11 October 2007
Zhe Xia (Joson) recently demonstrated to an audience of e-voting experts how the 'Voting Ducks' scheme is vulnerable to a number of significant threats. The experts were attending the the VOTE-ID conference held in Bochum, Germany, on the 4th-5th October, 2007, and both David Lundin and Joson attended to present papers.
David presented his work 'A simple technique for safely using Punchscan and Prêt à Voter in mail-in elections'. His presentation introduced Prêt à Voter, Punchscan and Scantegrity. Prêt à Voter is the system developed by David and the Electronic Voting Group at Surrey, which recently won the best system design category in the international Student Electronic Voting System Competition (VoComp) in July.
Joson’s work, 'Threat analysis of a practical voting scheme with receipts', demonstrated how the so called 'Voting Ducks' scheme, introduced by a Polish group in 2005, is vulnerable to certain attacks. After Joson's presentation, Berry Schoenmakers, one of the famous experts in cryptography, said he is very glad to see that 'Voting Ducks' has been shot down.
Further information on the Prêt à Voter system can be found at www.pretavoter.com.