Prerendered User Interfaces for Higher-Assurance Electronic Voting

I will describe plans and work completed so far on a new electronic voting architecture in which the voting user interface is prerendered and published before election day as an "electronic sample ballot." The publishing of the prerendered UI as a separate artifact enables public participation in the review, verification, usability testing, and accessibility testing of the ballot.

Preparing the user interface outside of the voting machine also dramatically reduces the amount of security-critical code in the machine, thus reducing the amount and difficulty of software verification required to assure the correctness of the election result. Our prototype software for a high-assurance touchscreen voting machine can support a wide range of user interface styles. Its implementation, which includes a validator for the ballot file, the interaction with the ballot itself, and history-independent storage of the cast votes, fits in less than 300 lines of Python.