Abstract:

Since 2000, all but eleven countries in the world have held national elections.  Most of these countries have been using computers in the voting process in one way or the other, for example, for checking off voters of the electoral role, for digitally recording of votes, and also for computing the social choice function.  Elections are the cornerstone of representative democracies, the collective trust of the voters in the voting process legitimizes its result.  Our work within the DemTech research project (www.demtech.dk) aims to maintain or even increase the level of the trust by applying modern theorem proving technology to the domain of voting protocols and schemas.

In my talk, I will report on the research activities within the DemTech project and present in detail how we use proof assistants (such as Agda and Celf) to bridge the gap between abstract definitions of security, declarative descriptions of electoral law, and certifiable computations.  We hope that our work will have a positive effect on voting processes around the world, make them safer, more reliable, less vulnerable to attack, and thus more trustworthy.