Partial Verifiability in POLYAS for the GI Elections
M. Maina Olembo, Anna Kahlert, Stephan Neumann, Melanie Volkamer · Repository KITopen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) · 2012
Abstract: We discuss the use of POLYAS, an Internet voting system, in GI (Ger-man Society for Computer Scientists (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.)) elections before 2010, in 2010 and 2011, as well as in the future. We briefly describe how the system was extended in 2010 to provide partial verifiability and how the in-tegrity of the GI election result was verified in the 2010 and 2011 elections. Infor-mation necessary for partial verifiability has so far only been made available to a small group of researchers. In the future it would be ideal to make such informa-tion available to the general public, or to GI members, in order to increase the level of verifiability. We highlight legal considerations accompanying these possibili-ties, including publishing more details about the election results, the requirement for secret elections, avoiding vote buying, and how to handle complaints. Moti-vated by legal constraints, we propose further improvements to the POLYAS sys-tem. Finally, we generalize our findings for any partially-verifiable Internet voting system. 1