TY - CONF
T1 - Machine-assisted election auditing
AU - Calandrino, Joseph A.
AU - Alex Halderman, J.
AU - Felten, Edward W.
N1 - Funding Information:
This material is based upon work supported under a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Funding Information:
Calandrino performed this research while under appointment to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Scholarship and Fellowship Program under DOE contract number DE-AC05-06OR23100. All opinions expressed in this paper are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect the policies and views of DHS or DOE.
Publisher Copyright:
© EVT 2007 - 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop. All rights reserved.
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Election audit procedures usually rely on precinct-based recounts, in which workers manually review all paper ballots from selected polling places, but these recounts can be expensive due to the labor required. This paper proposes an alternative audit strategy that allows machines to perform most of the work. Precincts are recounted using recounting machines, and their output is manually audited using efficient ballot sampling techniques. This strategy can achieve equal or greater confidence than precinct-based auditing at a significantly lower cost while protecting voter privacy better than previous ballot-based auditing methods. We show how to determine which ballots to audit against the recounting machines' records and compare this new approach to precinct-based audits in the context of Virginia's November 2006 election. Far fewer ballots need to be audited by hand using our approach. We also explore extensions to these techniques, such as varying individual ballots' audit probabilities based on the votes they contain, that promise further efficiency gains.
AB - Election audit procedures usually rely on precinct-based recounts, in which workers manually review all paper ballots from selected polling places, but these recounts can be expensive due to the labor required. This paper proposes an alternative audit strategy that allows machines to perform most of the work. Precincts are recounted using recounting machines, and their output is manually audited using efficient ballot sampling techniques. This strategy can achieve equal or greater confidence than precinct-based auditing at a significantly lower cost while protecting voter privacy better than previous ballot-based auditing methods. We show how to determine which ballots to audit against the recounting machines' records and compare this new approach to precinct-based audits in the context of Virginia's November 2006 election. Far fewer ballots need to be audited by hand using our approach. We also explore extensions to these techniques, such as varying individual ballots' audit probabilities based on the votes they contain, that promise further efficiency gains.
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M3 - Paper
AN - SCOPUS:84910671706
T2 - 2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, EVT 2007, co-located with the 16th USENIX Security Symposium
Y2 - 6 August 2007 through 6 August 2007
ER -