Voter Registration: A Security and Cryptography Perspective

Abstract

Security and transparency of voter registration systems are crucial properties that any electoral system must satisfy: without robust guarantees on the underlying voter data, trust in election results—and the system as a whole—is severely impacted.

In this thesis, we study two fundamental problems related to the security of voter registration. First, we formalize voter registration systems by providing a set of high-level definitions that characterize these systems in a general sense. To our knowledge, this is the first formal treatment of this sub-field of election security, which is (surprisingly) often neglected by the academic community. By abstracting away low-level implementation details, our work provides a clearer understanding of these complex systems; furthermore, it lays the formal groundwork and definitions which are useful to design secure technical protocols. Thus, we hope to pave the way for more research in this area.

Secondly, we give a brief overview of an ongoing work-in-progress consisting of a new design for voter registration systems with stronger transparency guarantees, where voters are able to independently verify that their data has not been tampered with, even in the presence of untrusted election officials. We hope that our eventual system increases voter confidence in the electoral system, and helps detect (and, thus, mitigate) attacks that target voter registration databases.