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Henrik Nore, Project Manager

E-vote2011project NorwayCOE workshop observation - Oslo 18.03.2010

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Facts on voting in Norway• Elections are held bi-annually• Alternating (4y) between municipal and

county elections, and parliamentary and Sami assembly elections

• Norway has a proportional electoral system where parties or lists win representatives according to their relative support in the electorate

• Voters are able to affect which candidates are elected by making individual changes to the ballot.

• 77% turnout on parliamentary elections (decreasing)

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The E-vote 2011 Project scope

• Replace current local existing administrative system for paper-votes with a central government owned and operated system (E/I/P-votes)

• Internet-voting from home/abroad in 2011 elections in in advanced voting period (Not election day)

• Use online electoral roll in polling stations

• Enable E-voting in poll stations for advanced voting (internet technology)

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The E-vote 2011 Project scope

• Add E-voting as supplement to paper-voting (multiple e-votes, cancel e-vote by p-vote)

• No e-voting in polling station on election day

• Pilots in 2011 in 11 municipalities and one county (approximately 200.000 possible voters)

• If success in 2011, full scale roll-out decided by parliament in 2012

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Implications of Internet voting

• Internet voting is inherently unobservable

• Therfore the role of the observers must change

• Auditing of Internet voting is possible

• Auditing combined with voter observation replaces the function of the observer in the polling station

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What are Norways advantages?(and prerequisites?)

• Very high public trust • Absolute trust in central election

administration• Relatively low level of political

conflict

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The Black Box Problem

• The counting of paper ballots is an open and observable process

• Paper ballots can be recounted

• E-vote recounts are absurd

• When you move an open and observable process inside a computer, you introduce a black box problem

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The Black Box Problem

Our goal is to make the black box as transparent as possible.

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What have we done so far?

• Full transparency in procurement process and project

• Completely open source• Use of wide spectrum of reference

groups• Third party QA• Internal QA by Kåre Vollan• Complete public ownership to

solution• Very active in presenting and

discussing project

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E-voting and security

• Secure e-voting is hard.• In e-voting, the security

requirements are really an operationalization of democratic principles• Secure authentication (one voter,

one vote)• Secrecy of the vote• Integrity of the ballot• Anti-collusion (every vote

counted correctly)

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The double envelope

Return Code Generator

Vote Collection Server

Voting client

Internet

Vote verification

Mix and count

End-to-end verification

Air gap

Conceptual model

M of N key shares from parties with competing interests

Voter Admnistrative system

Distribution of secrets

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Implications of Internet voting

• Internet voting is inherently unobservable

• Therfore the role of the observers must change

• Auditing of Internet voting is possible

• Auditing combined with voter observation replaces the function of the observer in the polling station

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Questions and answers