Abstract
A system’s security must be understood with respect to the capabilities and behaviors of an adversary Eve. It is often assumed in security analysis that Eve acts as maliciously as possible. From an economic perspective, Eve tries to maximize her utility in a game with other participants. The game’s rules are determined by the system and its security mechanisms, but Eve can invent new ways of interacting with participants. We show that Eve can be used as an interface to explore the interplay between security and economics in the domain of elections. Through examples, we illustrate how reasoning from both disciplines may be combined to explicate Eve’s motives and capabilities and how this analysis could be used for reasoning about the security and performance of elections. We also point to future research directions at the intersection of these disciplines.
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Notes
- 1.
The actual table in random sample elections is more involved and also includes information allowing one to ascertain that the right voters have been provided with ballots. We refer to [9] for further details, which are not relevant for this paper.
- 2.
In general, this does not hold for all citizens. A fraction of voters derives positive value from engaging in deliberation and voting.
- 3.
The simple model we consider is different from, yet similar in spirit to, the one considered by [19].
- 4.
Thus we assume that \(|N_3|=0\). This is without loss of generality. Moreover, a full-fledged analysis reveals in our setting that all members of \(N_2\) will apply for decoy votes.
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Basin, D., Gersbach, H., Mamageishvili, A., Schmid, L., Tejada, O. (2017). Election Security and Economics: It’s All About Eve. In: Krimmer, R., Volkamer, M., Braun Binder, N., Kersting, N., Pereira, O., Schürmann, C. (eds) Electronic Voting. E-Vote-ID 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10615. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_1
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