2023–24 Projects:
Advisor: Sneha Narayan, W/S
Voting is a fundamental part of participating in a democracy, and functioning democracies need to establish public trust in the voting system. This requires ensuring that the election's outcome actually reflects the popular will (and isn't influenced by malicious actors), that election results can be verified, and that the voting system is sufficiently understandable so that voters of all backgrounds can engage in the process confidently. Creating systems that meet these requirements for a large population is no easy feat. Voting systems have taken on many forms over the past several decades, including processes where people vote with their voice, with paper ballots, with paper/machine hybrid systems, and with fully electronic voting machines.
Voting machines present some significant advantages over paper voting. Counting up ballots can be done much more quickly (and cheaply) when you have a machine recording votes as they come in. Additionally, voting machines can support many assistive features that make voting accessible to a broader population, such as screen readers for the visually impaired, or immediate translation of the ballot into the language of the voter's choice.
However, electronic voting machines have also introduced their own complications. From the 1960s to the early 2000s, many elections in the US used punched-card voting machines, where voters would punch holes in a paper ballot, which was then fed into an electronic vote recorder for tabulation. During the 2000 Bush vs. Gore US presidential election, this system became a source of national controversy when the Florida recount had election officials arguing over whether 'hanging chads' (i.e. holes that were only partially punched out on a ballot) counted as legitimate votes. This controversy brought significant attention to user error and human-computer interaction issues in the voting process.
In the aftermath of the Florida recount, many states replaced punched card voting with touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic voting machines. However, these systems presented a new set of challenges. Security experts found that some of the most popular electronic voting machines had significant vulnerabilities and were susceptible to hacking. Indeed, some of these concerns were serious enough that in 2017, Virginia's Board of Elections unanimously voted to replace all of their Direct Recording Electronic voting machines.
In this project, you will do a deep dive into the literature on electronic voting machines, and implement and test a voting machine system in a mock election. This will likely involve the following steps:
This project will likely require background from CS 201 (Data Structures), as well as a willingness to engage with intersections between CS and the social sciences. If some subset of the team has taken courses like CS 231 - Computer Security or CS 341 - Cryptography, that could also come in handy. The prerequisites aren't too rigid though, since direction of this project will likely be influenced by the background and interests of those in the group.
TBD