Programme 2023

All times in CEST (Berlin/Brussels, GMT+2).

Venue: Neumünster Abbey

Tuesday, 3  October 2023  

10:30-16:30 PhD Colloquium (Programme below, by invitation only)

18.00-19:00 Welcome Cocktails (for all participants, Espace Nic Klecker at Neumünster Abbey)

Wednesday, 4 October 2023  

Location: Salle Edmond Dune at Neumünster Abbey

08.30 Registration opens

09.00 – 09.30 Conference Opening
Peter Y.A. Ryan, Melanie Volkamer, David Duenas-Cid and Peter Rønne

9.30 – 10.30  Invited Keynote: Véronique Cortier (LORIA laboratory, Nancy, France)

Chair: Melanie Volkamer

  • Cast as Intended in voting protocols: Electronic voting aims at guaranteeing two key properties, namely vote secrecy and verifiability. Verifiability makes sure that the result of the election reflects the vote of each voter. It is usually split in several sub-properties: cast-as-intended, recorded-as-cast, tallied-as-recorded, and eligibility verifiability. For example, tallied-as-recorded guarantees that the result corresponds to the set of recorded (encrypted) ballots. Academically, this property is well understood and several mature techniques have been designed, although they are not necessarily deployed in practice.
    For cast-as-intended, this is somehow the other way round: not so many academic protocols have been proposed, while several countries make nonetheless use of solutions with cast-as-intended mechanisms, with variable security guarantees. In this talk, we will review some existing cast-as-intended mechanisms and describe a new one: BeleniosCaI. We will discuss its usability on the one side, and how to formally prove it on the other side.

11.00 – 12.00  Session 1: Cryptographic Primitives for Voting

Chair: Johannes Müller

  • Linearly-Homomorphic Signatures for Short Randomizable Proofs of Subset Membership –  David Pointcheval
  • An Alternative Group for Applications of ElGamal in Cryptographic Protocols –  Rolf Haenni and Ilona Starý Kořánová

12:30 – 13.30  Lunch

13:30 – 15.00  Session 2: Trust but verify (I): verifiability in Internet voting

Chair: Beata Martin-Rozumilowicz

  • Verifiability Experiences in Ontario’s 2022 Online Elections –  Nicole Goodman, Iuliia Spycher-Krivonosova, Aleksander Essex and James Brunet
  • French 2022 legislatives elections: a verifiability experiment – Véronique Cortier, Pierrick Gaudry, Stéphane Glondu and Sylvain Ruhault
  • Voter Perception of Cast-as-Intended Verifiability in the Estonian i-vote protocol –  Tobias Hilt, Kati Sein, Tanel Mallo, Melanie Volkamer and Jan Willemson

15.15 – 16.45  Session 3: Security Definitions, Audits, and Recoverability in Voting

Chair: Aleksander Essex

  • Investigating transparency dimensions for Internet voting –  Samuel Agbesi, Jurlind Budurushi, Asmita Dalela and Oksana Kulyk
  • Adaptively Weighted Audits of Instant-Runoff Voting Elections: AWAIRE –  Alexander Ek, Philip B. Stark, Peter J. Stuckey and Damjan Vukcevic
  • On recoverability from failures in dual voting – Prashant Agrawal, Kabir Tomer, Abhinav Nakarmi, Mahabir Prasad Jhanwar, Subodh Sharma and Subhashis Banerjee

17.00 – 18.30  Session 4: ICT in elections: standards, benefits, and challenges

Chair: Iuliia Spycher-Krivonosova

  • Setting international standards on digital election technologies: mapping trends and stakeholders –  Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez and Jordi Barrat Esteve
  • Estimating carbon footprint of paper and Internet voting –  Jan Willemson and Kristjan Krips
  • Regulating for the “known unknowns” in Internet voting: quantum computing and long-term privacy – Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez, Núria Costa and Tamara Finogina

18.30 – 20.00 Poster and Demo Session, Tour of Neumünster Abbey

Chair: Michael Kirsten

Thursday, 5 October 2023  

Location: Salle Edmond Dune at Neumünster Abbey

9.00 – 10.00  Invited Keynote: Michael McGregor (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada)

Chair: Iuliia Spycher-Krivonosova

  • Internet voting and public opinion in a multi-level setting: The case of Canada: Canada is a federation with three orders of government (federal, provincial, and municipal). Only at the municipal level, however, has internet voting meaningfully taken hold. Hundreds of the country’s municipalities regularly run binding online elections, and some have done so for roughly two decades. Despite this largely successful track record, Canada’s national and provincial governments have never used internet voting for their elections.
    In this talk, I argue that public opinion is an important factor in explaining these across-level differences in adoption patterns. Using several survey datasets, I answer three groups of questions about Canadians’ attitudes towards online voting.
    First, to what extent do Canadians support the implementation of internet voting at each of the three levels of government? How do these attitudes compare to views on other types of reforms (including electoral system change, or extending the franchise to new groups)? Second, what are the individual-level correlates of support for the introduction of internet voting? Do Canadians view municipal elections as ‘second-order’ in nature, and if so, might this help us understand variation in attitudes towards the adoption of online voting? How are factors such as personality and partisanship related to support for internet voting? Third, does experience with internet voting at the municipal level make electors more supportive of the introduction of online elections at other levels?
    I conclude with a discussion of what public opinion research tells us about the prospects for the expansion of internet voting in Canada.

10.15 – 11.45  Session 5: Title: Internet Voting - Standards, Transparency, and Authentication

Chair: Peter Rønne

  • Online Voting in Ontario Municipalities: A Standards-based Review –  Aleksander Essex and James Brunet
  • Coercion Mitigation for Voting Systems with Trackers: A Selene Case Study –  Kristian Gjøsteen, Thomas Haines and Morten Rotvold Solberg
  • Coercion-resistant i-voting with short PIN and OAuth 2.0 – Matteo Bitussi, Riccardo Longo, Francesco Antonio Marino, Umberto Morelli, Amir Sharif, Chiara Spadafora and Alessandro Tomasi

12.15 – 13.30  Session 6: Trust but verify (II): trust and audits - Managing election integrity

Chair: Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez

  • Identifying Factors Studied for Voter Trust in E-Voting – A Literature Review –   Yannick Erb, David Duenas-Cid and Melanie Volkamer
  • Trust Frameworks in Application to Technology in Elections -   David Duenas-Cid, Leontine Loeber, Beata Martin-Rozumilowicz and Ryan Macias
  • Stylish RLAs in Practice –   Amanda Glazer, Jacob Spertus and Philip Stark

13.30 – 14:30  Lunch

14.30 – 16.00  Session 7: (Re)new(ed) experiences with Internet voting

Chair: Thomas Hofer

  • Swiss Online Voting Redesigned –  Oliver Spycher
  • Improving the Swiss Post Voting System: Practical Experiences from the Independent Examination and First Productive Election Event –  Olivier Esseiva, Audhild Høgåsen and Xavier Monnat
  • German Social Elections in 2023: An Overview and first Analysis - Tobias Hilt, Oksana Kulyk and Melanie Volkamer
  • Pitfalls at the Starting Line: Moldova’s IVS Pilot –   Radu Antonio Serrano Iova

16.30 – 17.45  Panel: "Capturing vote intent in verifiable voting"

Chair: Kristian Gjøsteen

  • Véronique Cortier
  • Liisa Past
  • Philip Stark
  • Peter Y. A. Ryan

18.15 –   Departure for Gala Dinner at Castle Bourglinster with Best Paper Awards

 

Friday, 6 October 2023  

Location: Salle Edmond Dune at Neumünster Abbey

9.00 – 10.00  Invited Keynote: Liisa Past (National Cyber Director of Estonia)

Chair: Beata Martin-Rozumilowicz

  • Who runs election technology? Roles, responsibilities and cooperation model of the election managers and technology partners: Developing and managing election technology is necessarily a wider effort involving technology partners, information security teams and others as well as the EMB. The responsibility of running free, fair, and open elections based on secret voting cannot be delegated from the election organizers while some of the technology-specific competencies and activities necessarily have to. This keynote will explore models of cooperation, the necessary responsibilities of all parties involved and how to make sure the constitutional/legal requirements on elections are fulfilled regardless of the modes of voting and deployment of technology. Examples of the Estonian prototype of expansion to e-voting on smart devices will be used as an illustration.

10.15 – 11.45  Session 8: Verifiability and Coercion Resistance

Chair: Tamara Finogina

  • CAISED: A Protocol for Cast-as-Intended Verifiability with a Second Device – Johannes Müller and Tomasz Truderung
  • Pretty Good Strategies for Benaloh Challenge –  Wojtek Jamroga
  • Faster coercion-resistant voting by encrypted sorting –  Diego F. Aranha, Michele Battagliola and Lawrence Roy

12.15 – 13.15  Rump Session

Chair: Thomas Hofer

13.15 - 13.30  Closing of the Conference

13.30 - 14.30  Lunch

All times given in CEST.

Pre-Conference Programme

Tuesday, 3  October 2023  

PhD Colloquium

Location: Chapelle at Neumünster Abbey

10:30 - 10.40 Welcome

10:40 - 12:00 Session 1

  • An encryption mechanism for receipt-free and perfectly private verifiable elections, Thi Van Thao Doan
  • Secure Post-Quantum E-Voting from the Hardness of Codes, Rafieh Mosaheb

12:15 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:50 Session 2

  • Publicly Auditable Yet Private Electoral Rolls, Prashant Agrawal
  • Verification and Modelling of Polish Postal Voting, Yan Kim

14:50 - 15:10 Break

15:10-16:30 Session 3

  • Digitizing election issues. The history of voting technologies in Kenya (2002-2017), Cecilia Passanti
  • Is electronic voting posing a "wicked problem”?, Märt Põder