How Not to Prove Your Election Outcome

Explore a critical analysis of the Scytl/SwissPost e-voting solution intended for Swiss government elections. Delve into the failures in both individual and universal verifiability, as defined in Swiss Federal Ordinance 161.116, stemming from flawed implementations of cryptographic components. Discover how these shortcomings allow for the creation of seemingly valid "proofs" of accurate election outcomes, despite vote manipulation. Examine the risks of implementing sophisticated cryptographic protocols without fully understanding their properties and conditions, potentially introducing opportunities for undetectable fraud in systems that appear to allow outcome verification. Learn about the immediate relevance of these findings to systems used in Switzerland and Australia, with potential implications for other countries. Gain insights from experts Thomas Haines, Sarah Jamie Lewis, Olivier Pereira, and Vanessa Teague in this 17-minute IEEE conference talk on the critical importance of robust election verification systems.