Electronic Elections

Corresponding Entry in Aachen Campus.

Responsible

Prof. Dr. Joachim von zur Gathen

Lecture

Michael Nüsken

Tutorial

Michael Nüsken

Exam

The exam will carry the hints displayed on the right.

Pre-exam meeting: NN, Cafeteria.

The first exam will be on 11 April 2008 in the time between 10⁰⁰ and 13⁰⁰ o'clock in the bitmax.

There will be a post-exam meeting on NN in the b-it, room NN. At this occasion you can also review our ranking of your exam.

Time & Place

Lecture: Wednesday 11³⁰-13⁰⁰, b-it Marschallsaal.
Tutorial: Monday 18⁰⁰-19³⁰, b-it 2.1 (or Caféte).
First meeting: Wednesday, 31 October 2007, 11³⁰.
First tutorial: Monday, 5 November 2007, 18⁰⁰.

Dies academicus: Lecture on Monday, 3 December, at b-it 2.1 instead of the tutorial. No course on Dies, Wednesday, 5 December.

Allocation

2+2 SWS, 4 credits.

Media Informatics: Computer and Communication Technology.
Recommendation for University of Bonn - Computer Science: A or A1, respectively.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge in cryptography might be helpful. Yet, this is not required.

Decision finding processes in most democratic societies are guided by the election of representatives. Some smaller states also conduct voting for particular decisions. Apart from political elections, a lot of other voting processes are in use to determine leaderships, opinions, ... Nowadays we require democratic elections to be free and fair. This implies several features, like anonymity and secrecy. (Secret elections only take place since about the middle of the nineteenth century.) German law requires even more:

Die Abgeordneten des Deutschen Bundestages werden in allgemeiner, unmittelbarer, freier, gleicher und geheimer Wahl gewählt. GG Art. 38 Abs. 1 Satz 1 (The members of the German Federal Diet are elected in general, direct, free, fair and secret elections.)

Since the advent of computers and the Internet people have tried to use the new means also in election processes. Major forces driving that are the cost and the election turnout. However, cheaper and faster election processes might have even more, yet unpredictable effects on society and democracy. The topic of the course shall be the treatment of the methods and the one or other solution for electronic elections. This ranges from simple voting machines to complete remote Internet election systems. In the latter, modern cryptographic methods are essential for ensuring major properties.

Lecture notes & exercises

The notes from the course (PDF, 5,3MB) contain all material up to Wednesday, 30 January 2008.

Exercise sheet 1.
Exercise sheet 2 with updates as of Friday 16:30.
Partial solution in MuPAD.
Exercise sheet 3 with minor updates as of Tuesday 18:50.
Exercise sheet 4. (That's a tricky one, start working on it soon!)
Exercise sheet 5.
Exercise sheet 6.
Exam preparation sheet.
Notes from the pre exam meeting.

Literature

Fiore (2004). Electronic Elections 2004.
Electronic Commision of India (1999-2007). Presentations.
Krishna Sampigethaya & Radha Poovendran (2006). A framework and taxonomy for comparison of electronic voting schemes. Computers & Security 25(2), 137-153.
The Sidney Morning Herald (2007/11/07). The hack of the year. [About how to use an anonymizer network like Tor to spoof sensitive information, based on people that do not know what to do.]

Mailinglist

Christoph was so kind to install the electronic elections mailing list for the course.