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2009 Electronic Voting Technology Workshop / Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (EVT/WOTE '09)

August 10--11, 2009
Montreal, Canada

Sponsored by USENIX: The Advanced Computing Systems Association, ACCURATE: A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable, and Transparent Elections and IAVoSS: The International Association for Voting System Sciences

EVT/WOTE '09 will be co-located with the 18th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security '09), August 10--14, 2009.

Important Dates

Refereed paper submissions due: April 17, 2009, 11:59 p.m. PDT
Notification of acceptance: May 26, 2009
Final files due: June 23, 2009

Workshop Organizers

Program Chairs

• David Jefferson, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Joseph Lorenzo Hall, University of California, Berkeley/Princeton University
• Tal Moran, Harvard University

Program Committee

• Ben Adida, Harvard University
• Michael Alvarez, California Institute of Technology
• Josh Benaloh, Microsoft Research
• Aaron Burstein, University of California, Berkeley
• Joseph Calandrino, Princeton University
• Aggelos Kiayias, University of Connecticut
• Andy Neff
• Lawrence Norden, New York University
• Whitney Quesenbery, WQUsability
• Eric Rescorla, RTFM, Inc.
• Ron Rivest, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Daniel Sandler, Rice University
• Vanessa Teague, University of Melbourne
• David Wagner, University of California, Berkeley
• Ping Yee, Google
• Additional Program Committee Members to be decided shortly

Overview

In the United States and many other countries, most votes are counted and transported electronically, but there are numerous practical and policy implications of introducing electronic machines into the voting process. Both voting technology and its regulations are very much in flux, with open concerns including accuracy, reliability, robustness, security, transparency, equality, privacy, usability, and accessibility.

This year, the organizers of the USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology workshop (EVT) have merged EVT with the IAVoSS Workshop on Trustworthy Elections (WOTE) to create a joint two-day workshop (EVT/WOTE '09). EVT/WOTE seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of disciplines, ranging from computer science and human-computer interaction experts through political scientists, legal experts, election administrators, and voting equipment vendors. EVT/WOTE seeks to publish original research on important problems in all aspects of electronic voting.

Soliciting New Material

In addition to the areas in which EVT has seen very strong submissions in the past (below), we are especially interested in the following types of contributions:

• Technical work from vendor engineers and developers.
• Scholarly work concerning legal and policy challenges.
• Work involving research with or about accessibility.
• Assessments, proposals and policy prescriptions involving registration technologies (e-pollbooks, online registration).
• Papers based on direct experiences with recent elections, possibly from election officials and their staff.

Standard Material

In general, we welcome papers on voting topics including but not limited to:

• Voter registration and pre-voting processes;
• Vote collection;
• Vote tabulation;
• Election auditing;
• Design, implementation, and evaluation of new voting technologies and protocols;
• Scientific evaluations of existing voting technologies;
• System testing methodologies;
• Deployment and lifecycle issues;
• Threat mitigation;
• Usability;
• Accessibility;
• Legal issues, including the ADA, HAVA, intellectual property, and nondisclosure agreements on voting system evaluations, and;
• Issues with and evolution of voting technology standards.
• Election integrity
• Ballot integrity
• Ballot secrecy
• Voter anonymity
• Voter authentication
• Receipts and coercion resistance
• Anonymous channels
• Secure bulletin boards
• Threat models
• Formal security analysis
• Electoral systems
• Case studies of electronic voting experiments
• Privacy, verifiability, and transparency in e-voting

EVT/WOTE '09 will be a two-day event, Monday, August 10, and Tuesday, August 11, 2009, co-located with the 18th USENIX Security Symposium in Montreal, Canada. In addition to paper presentations, the workshop may include panel discussions with substantial time devoted to questions and answers. The Proceedings of the workshop will be published electronically. Attendance at the workshop will be open to the public, although talks and refereed paper presentations will be by invitation only.

Refereed Paper Submission Instructions

All submissions must be in English and must include a title and the authors' names and affiliations. Papers must not be anonymized. We will consider both short position papers (up to eight (8) pages long) and longer, conference-style submissions (up to a maximum of sixteen (16) pages). Longer, conference-style papers, if rejected, will not be reconsidered as shorter position papers. Papers should be formatted 11 point font, a4 or letter paper and reasonable margins. If you wish, please make use of this LaTeX style file and sample LaTeX file (see the corresponding PDF here) when preparing your paper for submission. The page limits do not include the bibliography nor any appendices. Appendices may be used for material that does not fit in the main body of the paper (such as extended legal arguments or technical proofs). Note that reviewers are not required to read the appendices, so the papers should be intelligible without them. Papers that exceed the main paper page limit may be summarily rejected.

Each submission should have a contact author who should provide full contact information (email, phone, fax, mailing address). One author of each accepted paper will be required to present the work at the workshop.

Authors are required to submit papers by 11:59 p.m. PDT, April 17, 2009. This is a hard deadline; no extensions will be given. All submissions to EVT/WOTE '09 must be electronic, in PDF format, via a this Web form. Authors are encouraged to follow the U.S. National Science Foundation's guidelines for preparing PDF grant submissions:

https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/documents/pdf_create/pdfcreate_01.jsp

All submissions will be judged on originality, relevance, correctness, and clarity. In addition to citing relevant published work, authors should relate their submission to any other relevant submissions of theirs in other venues that are under review at the same time as their submission to the EVT/WOTE '09.

Simultaneous submission of the same work to multiple venues, submission of previously published work, and plagiarism constitute dishonesty or fraud. USENIX, like other scientific and technical conferences and journals, prohibits these practices and may, on the recommendation of a program chair, take action against authors who have committed them. In some cases, program committees may share information about submitted papers with other conference chairs and journal editors to ensure the integrity of papers under consideration. If a violation of these principles is found, sanctions may include, but are not limited to, barring the authors from submitting to or participating in USENIX conferences for a set period, contacting the authors' institutions, and publicizing the details of the case.

Note, however, that we expect that many papers accepted for EVT/WOTE '09 will eventually be extended as full papers suitable for presentation at future conferences or for future journal publications.

Authors uncertain whether their submission meets USENIX's guidelines should contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org or the USENIX office, submissionspolicy@usenix.org.

Papers accompanied by nondisclosure agreement forms will not be considered. Accepted submissions will be treated as confidential prior to publication on the USENIX EVT/WOTE '09 Web site; rejected submissions will be permanently treated as confidential.

Authors will be notified of acceptance decisions via email on or before May 26, 2009. If you do not receive notification by that date, contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org. Each accepted submission may be assigned a member of the program committee to act as its shepherd during the preparation of the final paper. The assigned member will act as a conduit for feedback from the committee to the authors.

All papers will be available online to registered attendees prior to the workshop and will be available online to everyone starting on August 10. If your accepted paper should not be published prior to the event, please notify production@usenix.org.

Panel Discussions

Depending on the quantity and quality of paper submissions, the program chairs may set aside one or two sessions for panel discussions. Ideas for panel discussions, including a title, brief description, and list of individuals participating on the panel, should be sent to evtwote09chairs@usenix.org by the paper submission deadline.

System Demos

We intend to provide an opportunity to demo systems and prototypes during the Workshop. Please contact the program chairs at evtwote09chairs@usenix.org.

Registration Materials

Complete program and registration information will be available in July 2009 on the workshop Web site. If you would like to receive the latest USENIX conference information, please join our mailing list.