E-voting.CC News

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E-Voting.CC Community News Issue 04
Vienna, June 26th 2007
http://www.e-voting.cc/
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Dear Readers!
It's been busy months since the last newsletter. The UK pilots took place, the Swiss agreed on further e-voting tests and received the UN Public Service Award.
At E-Voting.CC we were also quite active and we are proud on our new image folder (EN, DE) and published a report on the Austrian e-participation project Mitmachen.AT (only DE).
Further we continue to work on the database, we now have more than 200 entries, with nearly 145 on remote e-voting. So if you have uses of electronic voting machines please let us know as well! A first is due to appear over the summer
As always if you have any news on e-voting and e-participation which you want to share with the rest of the community feel free to send them to office@e-voting.cc.
Have a great summer, see you at one of the conferences in Dagstuhl or Bochum and hear you soon on the future of voting,
Robert Krimmer
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Short News
- Zurich Wins UN Public Service Award
- Swiss E-Voting Laws passed
- The May 3rd Pilots in the United Kingdom

Conferences, CfP
- VoteID 2007
- Dagstuhl
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____ Zurich E-Voting Project Wins UN Public Service Award _____________
The Zurich E-Voting project, one of the three projects besides Neuchâtel and Geneva, has won one of the United Nations Public Service Awards which are handed over today at the 7th Reinventing Government meeting in Vienna, Austria. The project which features mobile voting
from cell phones as well as via the Internet won in the category "Fostering Participation in Policy-making Decisions through Innovative Mechanisms" within Europe. See more

____ Swiss E-Voting Report and Laws Passed _____________
The Swiss parliament acknowledged and praised the cautious and risk-aware approach of the Swiss chancellery towards e-voting and passed the further steps to be taken (Word protocol of the meeting) last year on December 9th. This year on March 19th the Swiss second chamber, the Ständerat, acknowledged the report of May 31st 2006 as well and passed the law, which foresees further e-voting test runs - limited in time, issue and place. Further the law includes the harmonisation of the register on cantonal level of Swiss people living abroad. This is a central precondition to further pursue E-Voting for Swiss citizens abroad (word protocol of the meeting). The final decision by the parliament has then been taken on 23rd of March (The passed law in reading http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/ff/2007/2293.pdf). Currently the facultative referendum time is running till 12th of July 2007 and then become law. Switzerland is going forward on e-voting in a thoughtful manner to collect experience. By the assessment of the Swiss chancellery it will take further 30 years until it is implemented fully on national level and all instruments are implemented like signing initiatives. One thing is sure - Switzerland is moving slowly but steadily on adopting information and communication technologies in their electoral process.

____ The May 3rd Pilots in the UK _____________

On 3 May 2007, thirteen local authorities in the UK took part in twelve electoral pilot schemes. These were the latest in the series of pilots conducted as part of the Ministry of Justice’s (formerly the Department for Constitutional Affairs) Electoral Modernisation programme. The types of pilots include e-voting, e-counting, advance voting and signing for ballot papers in polling stations.
The purpose of the pilots is to learn more about:
- making elections more accessible, either by making it more convenient to vote or by making voting more attractive to people currently less likely to vote
- improving the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of electoral administration
- maintaining or increasing levels of security at elections
The Electoral Commission are formally evaluating the pilots and will
be publishing their report in early August.
Get further information on the Programme.
Besides the official information by the Ministry of Justice there has been a local observer group ORG (Open Rights Group) who observed the May 3rd pilots. The effort was coordinated by Jason Kitcat who also organized the "European Electronic Voting Activism Workshop" in February of this year. While their judgement somewhat biased, it is an important effort to rationalize the debate on e-voting and the pro and cons of it. Read it here http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/.

____ VOTEID 2007, Bochum (Germany) _____________
VOTE-ID 2007: "First Conference on E-Voting and Identity" Bochum (Germany) October 4 - 5, 2007 http://www.sirrix.com/content/pages/voteidcfp.htm
This workshop is the international research meeting point for e-voting experts from different disciplines: Computer Scientists (security, usability, availability, software engineering), Lawyers, Sociologist and Politicians.
Program-Chairs
Ammar Alkasar (Sirrix AG security technologies - GE)
Melanie Volkamer (Institute of IT-Security and Security Law – GE)
Program Committee
Josh Benaloh (Microsoft – US) Klaus Brunnstein (University of Hamburg – GE) Rüdiger Grimm (University of Koblenz-Landau - GE)Marit Hansen (Independent Center of Privacy Protection - GE) Dirk Heckmann (ISL – University of Passau – GE) David-Olivier Jaquet-Chiffelle (University of Applied Sciences of Bern – CH) Frank Koob (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -GE) Robert Krimmer (evoting.cc –Wien- AT) Ronald Leenes (Tilburg University –NL) Helger Lipmaa (University College London – UK) Sjouke Mauw (University of Luxembourg – LU) Margaret McGaley (NUI Maynooth -IR) Lilian Mitrou (University of the Aegean –GR) Olivier Pereira (Université catholique de Louvain - BE) Günther Pernul (Universität Regensburg - GE) Andreas Pfitzmann (Technical University of Dresden – GE) Bart Preneel (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven –BE) Kai Rannenberg (Universität Frankfurt –GE) Peter Ryan (Newcastle University –UK) Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (University of Bochum -GE) Joseph Savirimuthu (University of Liverpool - UK) Berry Schoenmakers (TU Eindhoven –NL)
GOAL
The aim of this Workshop is to bring together e-voting specialists in order to discuss ….
* all forms of E-Voting (including but not limited to polling station, mobile voting, kiosk or remote voting by electronic means)
* the role of identity and identification for E-Voting systems
* profiling aspects
* role of commercial voting systems; are commercial identity management systems suitable for e-voting?
* threats: identity frauds/theft, privacy issues
* usability and accessibility issues (both for voters and for administrators)
* legal issues
* design and analysis of E-Voting schemes and protocols, their deployment and lifecycle concerns
* security requirements, formal analysis and evaluation of electronic voting schemes and systems
* concrete issues, like necessity of verifiability/digital receipts problems/anonymous channel in practise
* interdisciplinary issues involved (link between identity and digital identity and E-Voting )
* interrelationship with and the effects of E-Voting on democratic institutions and processes as well as voter behaviour
* social and political analysis of the effects of electronic voting
* new ways of solving the voting paradigm of unequivocal
identification of the voter and full anonymity of the vote
Submission Guidelines
There is a strict limit of 12 pages. Follow carefully the LNCS
instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Send your paper to VOTE-ID2007@SIRRIX.COM until 31th July 2007 23:59 (CET) . All submissions should be anonymized (an author's name should only occur in references to that author's related work, which should be referenced in the third person and not overtly distinguishable from the referenced work of others).
Each submission should have a contact author who should provide full contact information (email, phone, fax, mailing address). One author of each accepted paper will be required to present the work at the workshop.
Submissions must not substantially duplicate work that any of the authors has published elsewhere or has submitted in parallel to any other conference or workshop with proceedings. Information about submissions may be shared with program chairs of other conferences for that purpose.
Accepted Contributions
Full paper submissions will be subject to a double-blind review. Accepted papers will be available as pre-proceedings at the conference. The post-proceedings are planed to be published within LNCS Springer, including the feedback of the workshop discussion and after the final approvement by Springer.
Deadlines
Draft of the paper.................... 31th July 2007 Notification of acceptance ......3rd September 2007 Receipt of the final paper.........19th October 2007
Contact Address
Sirrix AG security technologies
Ammar Alkassar
Im Stadtwald, Geb. D 3.2
66123 Saarbrücken
Germany
E-Mail: VOTE-ID2007@sirrix.com

____ Dagstuhl E-Voting Seminar ______________________
Frontiers of Electronic Voting, Dagstuhl (Germany)
29.07. - 03.08.2007
http://www.dagstuhl.de/programm/kalender/semhp/?semnr=07311
David Chaum (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, B)
Miroslaw Kutylowski (Institute of Mathematics & Informatics/TU Wroclaw, PL) Ronald L. Rivest (MIT - Cambridge, USA) Peter Ryan (University of Newcastle, GB)
Participation is only available upon invitation or approval by the committee.
Motivation
Democracy and voting systems have received considerable attention of late, with the validity of many elections around the world being called into question. The US experience demonstrates that simply deploying technological "solutions" does not solve the problem and can easily exacerbate it. Nevertheless many other countries are either deploying e-voting and e-counting systems or planning to do it.

The aim of the seminar is to present and discuss promising technologies, schemes, and cryptographic protocols to achieve high assurance of accuracy and privacy in the casting and counting of votes. Special attention will be given to attacks and dangers that emerge for electronic voting systems.
The challenge is highly socio-technical in nature: requires an excellent understanding of the potentialities and dangers of technological approaches as well as an appreciation of the social, legal and political impact. The seminar thus aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry, whose work relates to electronic voting systems, to evaluate the state of the art, to share practical experiences, and to look for possible enhancements. The overall aim then is to stimulate discourse between the various stakeholders and enhance the understanding of voting technologies and practices.
Detailed topics
Anonymity
Many e-voting protocols via Internet require anonymous communication channels between a voter and a voting authority. This has to protect a voter from being monitored and guarantee freedom of voting. Existing anonymous communication protocols do not provide full protection against advanced traffic analysis techniques. Particularly critical is the problem of an active, adaptive adversary. Satisfactory solutions on practical or theoretical level have not been developed so far. Voter and ballot authenticationBallot and voter’s authentication contradict privacy requirements. While fulfilling only one of these goals can be achieved with existing techniques, authentication of anonymous data is a challenging task requiring sophisticated schemes.
Trustworthy voting machines
Voting machines should provide guarantees for accuracy and voters’ privacy. Achieving this goal with standard devices is a hard task - the design principles and existing architectures contradict the requirements for secure voting machines. On the other hand, due to economic reasons special purpose hardware should be avoided. Apart from technical security, voting machines should work so that a voter may be convinced about its honesty without a detailed audit of a (black-box) machine on a high technical level. Preferably, no specialized voting machines should be necessary in e-voting. Receipts and coercion resistanceOne of principle techniques for controlling election process is using paper trails of electronic ballots. This technique, gaining acceptance in USA, has to protect against frauds by voting machines. The problem 2 is to balance evidence of fair vote counting and the danger of coercing the voter based on data contained in his receipt. Election integrity and verifiability

A key issue for an e-voting process is to provide a simple evidence of fair counting of votes and lack of manipulations. Security of the scheme should be provided even if some of the authorities involved in the process collude. Possible techniques range from global verifiability (audit procedure requires all ballots) to local verifiability (it is possible to check if a single ballot has been included in the results).
Cryptographic attacks
Attacks against e-voting systems can be focused on breaking privacy of voters, breaking integrity of election results or manipulating them. Even the possibility of breaking voters’ privacy may be disastrous for e-democracy. Recent advances show that specialized attacks focused on these attack scenarios are possible. Attack scenarios are not confined to classical cryptographic attacks, but also may exploit communication framework, operating systems issues, kleptographic techniques, side channel
attack and so on.
Formal security analysis and threat models
Formal evaluation of e-voting protocols is necessary to provide necessary level of assurance and design tools for audit procedures. This is due to the overall complexity level of voting systems in their complex social and technological environment.
Case studies of voting systems
Systems offered commercially have to be evaluated for suitability for fair e-voting. So far such systems do not fulfil all security requirements and need to be carefully inspected against possible threats.
Standardization
Developing working systems on the commercial market need developing industrial standards. The problem is that many design problems have not been solved yet. Currently we have to do with "co-design" of standards and technology.
Legal problems of e-voting
One of the major problems in developing e-voting technologies is diversity of legal frameworks for voting systems. The differences might be quite deep concerning such issues as limited anonymity in UK, a complicated election rules in Ireland. Finding legal concepts that would encompass most existing legal systems is also a question of economic feasibility of e-voting systems – the technological should be mobile in the sense that they may be deployed in most countries with minimal adjustments.
Social issues of e-voting
Apart from technical and legal issues, the key problems in evoting systems is the challenge of social accessibility, acceptance and influence on voters’ behaviour. The systems developed need to be simple for use, understandable, but nevertheless provide full security. Many schemes proposed so far use advanced techniques hard to comprehend even for specialists - and therefore they are unacceptable for deployment.