STAR-Vote: A Secure, Transparent, Auditable, and Reliable Voting System

  • Susan Bell ,
  • ,
  • Michael D. Byrne ,
  • Dana DeBeauvoir ,
  • Bryce Eakin ,
  • Gail Fisher ,
  • Philip Kortum ,
  • Neal McBurnett ,
  • Julian Montoya ,
  • Michelle Parker ,
  • Olivier Pereira ,
  • Philip B. Stark ,
  • Dan S. Wallach ,
  • Michael Winn

USENIX Journal of Election Technology and Systems (JETS) |

STAR-Vote is a collaboration between a number of academics and the Travis County (Austin), Texas elections office, which currently uses a DRE voting system and previously used an optical scan voting system. STAR-Vote represents a rare opportunity for a variety of sophisticated technologies, such as end-to-end cryptography and risk limiting audits, to be designed into a new voting system, from scratch, with a variety of real world constraints, such as election-day vote centers that must support thousands of ballot styles and run all day in the event of a power failure. This paper describes the current design of STAR-Vote which is now largely settled and whose development will soon begin.