4 May 2010, RISC Seminar, Professor Ron Rivest (MIT)

While running an election sounds simple, it is in fact extremely challenging. Not only are there millions of voters to be authenticated and millions of votes to be carefully collected, counted, and stored, there are now millions of "voting machines" containing millions of lines of code to be evaluated for security vulnerabilities. Moreover, voting systems have a unique requirement: the voter must not be given a "receipt" that would allow them to prove how they voted to someone else - otherwise the voter could be coerced or bribed into voting a certain way. This lack of receipts makes the design of secure voting system much more challenging than, say, the security of banking systems (where receipts are the norm).

For more information, see http://projects.cwi.nl/crypto/risc.html