2006 Articles

Prerendered User Interfaces for Higher-Assurance Electronic Voting

Yee, Ka-Ping; Wagner, David A.; Hearst, Marti; Bellovin, Steven Michael

We propose an electronic voting machine architecture in which the voting user interface is prerendered and published before election day. The prerendered user interface is a verifiable artifact—an electronic sample ballot—enabling public participation in the review, verification, usability testing, and accessibility testing of the ballot. Preparing the user interface outside of the voting machine dramatically reduces the amount and difficulty of software verification required to assure the correctness of the election result. We present a design for a high-assurance touchscreen voting machine that supports a wide range of user interface styles and demonstrate its feasibility by implementing it in less than 300 lines of Python code.