On the Use of Financial Data as a Random Beacon.
Jeremy Edmund Clark, Urs Hengartner · 2010
In standard voting procedures, random audits are one method for increasing election integrity. In the case of cryptographic (or end-to-end) election verification, random challenges are often used to establish that the tally was computed correctly. In both cases, a source of randomness is required. In two recent binding cryptographic elections, this randomness was drawn from stock market data. This approach allows anyone with access to financial data to verify the challenges were generated correctly and, assuming market fluctuations are unpredictable to some degree, the challenges were generated at the correct time. However the degree to which these fluctuations are unpredictable is not known to be sufficient for generating a fair and unpredictable challenge. In this paper, we use tools from computational finance to provide an estimate of the amount of