Origami voting: a non-cryptographic approach to transparent ballot verification

Enka Blanchard (1) , Ted Selker (2)

1 LORIA - ALGO - Department of Algorithms, Computation, Image and Geometry
2 UMBC - University of Maryland [Baltimore County]

Over the past four decades, fear of election manipulation and hacking has spurred the security technology community to propose a variety of voting systems to implement verifiable voting. Most of these rely on hard to understand cryptographic protocols, which can affect whether users actually verify their selections. Three-Ballot and Vote/Anti-Vote/Vote, two related systems among the few non-cryptographic end-to-end verifiable voting systems, made improvements in security while eliminating complex protocols. They unfortunately suffered from usability issues, and although they did not require cryptographic primitives, they still relied on electronic devices. To address this, we introduce three folded-paper based systems that allow verifiable voting and resist common attacks despite not relying on any cryptography or electronic devices. The proposals are based on 1) semi-translucent ballots, 2) masking tape, or 3) folding and punching. These Origami voting methods help users understand the underlying mechanisms and give them a direct geometric approach to verification.

Mots clés: Usable security; Voting systems; Verifiable voting; Low-technology

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]

Enka Blanchard, Ted Selker. Origami voting: a non-cryptographic approach to transparent ballot verification. FC 2020 - 5th Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting, Feb 2020, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia. ⟨hal-02550738⟩