Verifying complex elections
Vanessa Teague
Abstract:
Imagine for a moment that we live in a world where genuine evidence based on a transparent process is a good way to build public trust in election results. (Maybe actually we do, but we haven't quite got it right yet.) This is a lot easier in some settings than others. Risk Limiting Audits (RLAs) provide statistical guarantees that the election outcome is correct, given some assumptions about the validity of the paper records. However, until recently, RLAs were only known for simple election schemes such as plurality. I'll discuss our extension of RLAs to Instant-Runoff voting (IRV) and describe practical deployments in multiple US jurisdictions.
Offer: Depending on interest, I can also discuss some cryptographic analysis of e-voting systems in Switzerland and Australia.
Bio:
Vanessa Teague is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science. Her research focuses primarily on cryptographic methods for achieving security and privacy, particularly for issues of public interest such as election integrity and the protection of government data. She was part of the team (with Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein) who discovered the easy re-identification of doctors and patients in the Medicare/PBS open dataset released by the Australian Department of Health. She has co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in NSW, Western Australia and Switzerland.