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Link: http://research.microsoft.com/conferences/WOTE2007/

Location: University of Ottawa; Ottawa, CANADA, June 20-21, 2007. (Held in conjunction with 7th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies.)

Call for Papers

Background

The workshop is organized by IAVoSS, the International Association for Voting Systems Sciences, in association with the 7th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. It follows in the tradition of the series of workshops devoted to cryptographic voting methods, such as WOTE '01, the DIMACS Workshop 2004, FEE 2005, the NeSC Workshop on e-voting and e-democracy, and WOTE 2006.

Follow up:

Scope and Objectives

Democracy and voting systems have received considerable attention of late, with the validity of many elections around the world being called into question. The aim of the workshop is to present and discuss promising technologies and schemes to achieve high assurance of accuracy and privacy in the casting and counting of votes.

The challenge is highly socio-technical in nature and requires an understanding of the technological approaches as well as an appreciation of their social, legal, and political impact. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry as well policy makers, voting officials, and others whose work relates to electronic voting systems, to evaluate the state of the art, to share practical experiences, and to look for possible enhancements. The overall goal is to stimulate discourse between the various stakeholders and enhance the understanding of voting technologies and practices.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• Election integrity
• Ballot integrity
• Ballot secrecy
• Voter anonymity
• Voter authentication
• Receipts and coercion resistance
• Anonymous channels
• Secure bulletin boards
• Threat models
• Formal security analysis
• Registration systems
• Electoral systems
• Performance evaluation and rating
• Case studies of electronic voting experiments
• Usability of voting systems
• Accessibility of voting
• Effects of voting technology on voter behavior
• Privacy, verifiability, and transparency in e-voting
• The role of e-voting within e-democracy
• The relation between e-voting and models of democracy
• Philosophical, ethical, and legal aspects
• E-voting, human rights, and the digital divide
• History of voting technology
• Public acceptability

Format

The workshop will consist of invited keynote presentations and contributed presentations. Panel discussions are also anticipated and submissions of suitable topics, with or without a moderator or example participants are welcome. Accepted papers, abstracts and panel proposals will appear online.

A separate category of presentations, Informal Communications, encourages preliminary ideas or status updates and requires only a short summary be submitted that may even relate to submissions to other conferences.

Student stipends

It is hoped that there will be some funding available for student stipends. If you would like to apply for a stipend please contact the Josh Benaloh with a brief justification benaloh@microsoft.com. If you are or know of a potential sponsor, please contact Josh Benaloh.

System Demos

We intend to provide an opportunity to demo systems and prototypes during the Workshop. Please apply to Josh Benaloh at benaloh@microsoft.com.

Invited Speakers

TBD

Contributions

WOTE 2007 will not have formal proceedings. Acceptance of an extended abstract for presentation at WOTE does not preclude publication elsewhere. Negotiations with a major academic publsher are underway to compile a volume of select extended abstracts from WOTE 2007 and prior WOTE meetings.

Submissions must be anonymous, with no author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, or obvious references. Contributions from WOTE 2007 Program Committee members are welcomed. To contribute a presentation, please submit an extended abstract summarizing a technical contribution or a position paper summarizing your research to https://msrcmt.research.microsoft.com/WOTE2007/. Contributions will be selected by the expected interest in the topic and the potential for stimulating exchange of ideas among the participants.

A submission must be a PDF file of at most 8 pages, in letter-or A4-format, using at least 11pt fonts and no non-standard character sets. Authors are encouraged to follow the U.S. National Science Foundation's guidelines for preparing PDF documents (http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/documents/pdf_create/pdfcreate_01.jsp).

All submissions must be received by 11:59pm GMT on 9 April, 2007, and notification of acceptance will be sent by 7 May, 2007.

Potential SponsorsPlease contact benaloh@microsoft.com.

WOTE Chairs

• David Chaum (Votegrity, USA)
• Ron Rivest (MIT, USA)

WOTE 2007 Program/General Chair

• Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research, USA)

Proceedings Editor

• David Chaum (Votegrity, USA)

Program Committee

• Ben Adida (Harvard, USA)
• Josh Benaloh (Microsoft Research, USA)
• Stephanie Delaune (LORIA, France)
• Rosario Gennaro (IBM Research, USA)
• Jeroen van der Graaf (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil)
• Joseph Lorenzo Hall (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
• David Jefferson (Lawrence Livermore Lab, USA)
• Doug Jones (University of Iowa, USA)
• Ari Juels (RSA Security, USA)
• Steve Kremer (Ecole Normale Superieure de Cachan, France)
• Robert Krimmer (Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Austria)
• Tal Moran (Weizmann Institute, Israel)
• Andy Neff (VoteHere, USA)
• Peter Neumann (SRI International, Computer Science Lab, USA)
• Ron Rivest (MIT, USA)
• Mark Ryan (University of Birmingham, UK)
• Peter Ryan (Newcastle University, UK)
• Kazue Sako (NEC, Japan)
• Berry Schoenmakers (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
• Michael Shamos (CMU, USA)
• Jacques TraorÈ (France Telecom R&D, France)
• Poorvi Vora (George Washington University, USA)
• David Wagner (University of California at Berkeley, USA)
• Michael Wiener (Cryptographic Clarity, Canada)