Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization
Braden L. Crimmins, J. Alex Halderman, Bradley Sturt

TL;DR
This paper introduces a formal, robust optimization-based method for designing election test decks that guarantees detection of misconfigurations while minimizing ballot count, improving election security cost-effectively.
Contribution
It presents the first formal approach to designing secure test decks using robust optimization, with an efficient algorithm and real-world validation in Michigan elections.
Findings
Test decks with security guarantees require only 1.2% more ballots on average.
The approach effectively detects all voting machine misconfigurations causing vote swaps.
It has been successfully piloted in Michigan elections, enhancing security and trust.
Abstract
For more than a century, election officials across the United States have inspected voting machines before elections using a procedure called Logic and Accuracy Testing (LAT). This procedure consists of election officials casting a test deck of ballots into each voting machine and confirming the machine produces the expected vote total for each candidate. We bring a scientific perspective to LAT by introducing the first formal approach to designing test decks with rigorous security guarantees. Specifically, our approach employs robust optimization to find test decks that are guaranteed to detect any voting machine misconfiguration that would cause votes to be swapped across candidates. Out of all the test decks with this security guarantee, our robust optimization problem yields the test deck with the minimum number of ballots, thereby minimizing implementation costs for election…
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Videos
Improving the Security of United States Elections with Robust Optimization· youtube
Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
