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Concept
End-to-end auditable voting systems
Summary
End-to-end auditable or end-to-end voter verifiable (E2E) systems are voting systems with stringent integrity properties and strong tamper resistance. E2E systems often employ cryptographic methods to craft receipts that allow voters to verify that their votes were counted as cast, without revealing which candidates were voted for. As such, these systems are sometimes referred to as receipt-based systems.
Electronic voting systems arrive at their final vote totals by a series of steps:
each voter has an original intent,
voters express their intent on ballots (whether interactively, as on the transient display of a DRE voting machine, or durable, as in systems with voter verifiable paper trails),
the ballots are interpreted, to generate electronic cast vote records,
cast vote records are tallied, generating totals
where counting is conducted locally, for example, at the precinct or county level, the results from each local level are combined to produce the final tally.
Classical approaches to election integrity tended to focus on mechanisms that operated at each step on the chain from voter intent to the final total. Voting is an example of a distributed system, and in general, distributed system designers have long known that such local focus may miss some vulnerabilities while over-protecting others. The alternative is to use end-to-end measures that are designed to measure the integrity of the entire chain.
The failure of conventional optical scan voting systems to meet
an end-to-end standard was pointed out in 2002.
Comprehensive coverage of election integrity frequently involves multiple stages. Voters are expected to verify that they have marked their ballots as intended, recounts or audits are used to protect the step from marked ballots to ballot-box totals, and publication of all subtotals allows public verification that the overall totals correctly sum the ballot-box totals.
While measures such as voter verified paper audit trails and manual recounts measure the effectiveness of some steps, they offer only weak measurement of the integrity of the physical or electronic ballot boxes.
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