| Public sector elections are too important to be carried out without voter oversight. Voters should have the ability to audit every step of the process, from the recording of the cast ballots, to the tallying of the votes and the declaration of the election outcome. This is a challenging problem, because the voting system must not infringe on voter privacy; coerced voters do not contribute to the advancement of democracy and the possibility of coercion should be explicitly addressed by any modern voting system. Current commercially-available voting systems do not provide voters the ability to verify that votes are indeed tallied as cast.;This dissertation explores a new class of voting systems that have unexpected properties in all aspects of the voting process. It presents novel techniques used in the implementation of verifiable, secret-ballot voting systems that are secure, fast, reliable and easy to use and understand. These techniques are presented in the context of an original, complete, framework for secure electronic voting that allows the integration of many new techniques into a coherent and complete voting system. The framework encompasses both polling place voting and remote voting (including Internet voting) and provides a large variety of choices in terms of security, usability, availability, computational effort and cost. A variety of modular components are proposed, that can be combined in virtually any configuration to serve the concrete purpose of particular elections and organizations. The dissertation also describes three elections that were carried out with the implemented voting systems. |
