1. Wombat Voting Alon Rosen IDC Herzliya July 20, 2012

2. Amnon Ta Shma (TAU) Douglas Wikstrom (KTH) Ben Riva (TAU) Niko Farhi (TAU) Morgan Llewellyn (IMT Lucca) Jonathan Ben-Nun IDC Students: Tomer Gabbai, Doron Sharon, Shiran Kleiderman, Ido Bergerfroind, Asaf Gamliel, Daniel Rapaport, Omri Baumer, Asaf Inger, Eitan Grundland Project Participants

3. Electronic voting in Israel

4. The Israeli System

5. 4 Years ago… Well, introducing computers will help us for sure * Meir Shitrit, Israel’s former Minister of Interior

6. Not what we hoped for... The design process was problematic: No public scrutiny No open design And, the resulting system was not satisfactory: No paper trail No transparency …

7. Why is this so challenging?

9. Secrecy vs. Verifiability Voting system convince Alice Carl the coercer

10. 1.Alice verifies her vote. 2.Everyone verifies tallying. 3.Alice cannot be coerced by Carl. Desired Properties

11. 1892 - Australian Ballot

12. Paper vs. Electronic Paper elections Local attacks Lacks transparency Electronic elections today Global attacks Undetectable Unrecoverable No transparency Ideally No local/global attacks Full transparency

13. What is Transparency? Anyone can verify that: their vote is cast as intended the votes were counted as cast

14. The Wombat Voting System

15. Simple design. Voter privacy. End-to-end verifiability. No need to trust the designers! Main Features

16. Objectives Easy to use. Versatile. Paper backup.

17. Public Ballots Alice Alice: Sweet Bridget: Sweet Carol: Salty Tally Sweet….2 Salty…...1

18. Encrypted Public Ballots Alice: Sweet Bridget: Sweet Carol: Salty Tally Sweet….2 Salty…...1 Alice verifies her vote Everyone verifies the tally Alice

19. System components Dual ballot Voting machine Polling station committee Public bulletin board Mixnet Vote

20. The Ballot אא

21. Voting Booth Vote selection Ballot printing Hardware – Touch screen – Printer

22. Polling Station Voter identification Vote casting Hardware – A desktop computer – 2D barcode scanner

23. Website (Hebrew)

24. Website (English)

25. Elections set-up

26. Voting

27. Simple and Familiar

28. Tallying Encrypted votes are mixed by the mixnet. Mixed decrypted votes and proofs of correctness are published in the Bulletin board. Paper votes may be tallied according to policy.

29. Auditing Auditing the machine (“cast as intended”): Audit by users using Android application. Random audit by designated auditors. Auditing the bulletin board. Android application. Validation of mixnet proofs of correctness: Built-in verifier. 2 Independent verifiers.

30. Verification (manual)

31. Verification (phone)

32. Behind the scenes Auditing the booth: cast-or-audit

33. Behind the scenes Auditing the booth: cast-or-audit Auditing the tally: Verifiable Mixnet

34. Elections with Wombat IDC Student council elections: May 17-19 2011 Meretz party chairman: February 7, 2012 IDC Student council elections: May 21-23 2012

35. IDC 2011 Elections Non-profit college with ~6000 students. 28 different races. Students eligible to vote on multiple races. 2097 students voted.

36. Some Statistics Voting took 1-2 minutes: 30 Seconds for voter identification 30 Seconds for scanning the ballot 579 voters verified ballot at bulletin board Students encouraged to verify with a coveted prize (2 x faculty parking spots).

37. Questionnaire 403 students answered an on-line survey. 78 answered a random exit survey. Students encouraged to answer by offering prize. High levels of voter satisfaction and confidence. The processes of folding ballots and validating votes should be improved.

38. Questionnaire “How satisfied are you with your voting experience?” “The Voting Process Was Clear and Simple”

39. Meretz Party Leader Party leader elected by party council consisting of 950 representatives. Highly diverse set of voters: Age (many over 50), gender, education, ethnicity… 830 (88%) voted. 23 voters verified their vote.

40. IDC 2012 Elections 2120 Students voted. Only 16 students checked their votes.

41. Difficulties & Lessons Technical difficulties: Electricity power loss. Printer hanging. Difficulties in folding the ballot. Mitigated by volunteers instructing voters before entering the voting booth.

42. Pictures

60. Website URL http://www.wombat-voting.com