End-to-End Voting Systems Workshop

October 13-14, 2009

HIGHLIGHTS - NIST sponsors End-to-End Voting System Workshop

On October 13-14, NIST sponsored an End-to-End Voting System Workshop designed to bring together researchers in cryptography, security, and usability and election practitioners including election officials and voting system manufacturers to explore the security and usability properties of this type of innovative voting system.

Keynote talks described the fundamental notation of end-to-end voting systems and a State and election official’s perspective on innovative voting systems. A tutorial on how end-to-end voting systems work provided a common background for the workshop participants. A proposal of the desired properties for end-to-end voting systems was presented to provide context for the topics of the workshop to be explored. Five panels discussed a wide range of topics that impact end-to-end voting systems including usability, security, desired properties, and tradeoffs between different types of implementations. The final panel explored what the next steps should be to advance end-to-end voting systems including needed research, pilots, and standardization. Four referred papers were accepted that described experiences with end-to-end voting systems used for elections and novel implementations of end-to-end voting systems.

The two-day workshop was held at The George Washington University and attended by over 60 participants from the US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Poland, and the UK.

Nelson Hastings, NIST

Andrew Regenscheid, NIST