Adder: an Internet-based Voting System
Introduction
The Adder voting system is a free and open-source
Internet-based electronic voting system which employs strong
cryptography.
Adder was built at the University
of Connecticut, in the Computer Science & Engineering
Department, by members of the CryptoDRM Laboratory.
News
(January 2009) Project in hiatus.
(23 June 2008) We are currently working on a
long-awaited new version of Adder. It is estimated that this new
version will be completed by 20 August 2007.
(23 February 2007) Version 0.1.0 is available
for download! This is our first
public release.
Design Goals
The following principles are central to the project:
- Transparency: All of the data in the main server
database should be accessible to the public. This includes the
encrypted votes, public encryption keys, and final totals. The main
server database does not store secrets.
- Universal Verifiability: Any result obtained by
the system should be verifiable by any third party. By inspecting the
election transcript, it should be possible to perform a complete audit
of any procedure.
- Privacy: All voters in an election should be
confident that their individual choices will remain hidden. Only the
total is made available to the public.
- Distributed Trust: Each procedure is "supervised"
by multiple authorities, and the final sum cannot be revealed without
the cooperation of a given number of authorities. Any attempt to
undermine the procedure will require the corruption of a set number of
authorities. Authorities and voters may overlap arbitrarily. Thus, it
is possible for the voters themselves to ensure trustworthiness.
Acknowledgement
The ADDER project was partly funded by NSF SGER Award 0751095.
