A formally verified single transferable voting scheme with fractional values

Milad K. Ghale, Rajeev Goré, Dirk Pattinson*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    6 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We formalise a variant of the Single Transferable Vote scheme with fractional transfer values in the theorem prover Coq. Our method advocates the idea of vote counting as application of a sequence of rules. The rules are an intermediate step for specifying the protocol for vote-counting in a precise symbolic language. We then formalise these rules in Coq. This reduces the gap between the legislation and formalisation so that, without knowledge of formal methods, one can still validate the process. Moreover our encoding is modular which enables us to capture other Single Transferable Vote schemes without significant changes. Using the built-in extraction mechanism of Coq, a Haskell program is extracted automatically. This program is guaranteed to meet its specification. Each run of the program outputs a certificate which is a precise, independently checkable record of the trace of computation and provides all relevant details of how the final result is obtained. This establishes correctness, reliability, and verifiability of the count.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationElectronic Voting - 2nd International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2017, Proceedings
    EditorsMelanie Volkamer, Olivier Pereira, Robert Krimmer, Norbert Kersting, Carsten Schurmann, Nadja Braun Binder
    PublisherSpringer Verlag
    Pages163-182
    Number of pages20
    ISBN (Print)9783319686868
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2017
    Event2nd International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2017 - Bregenz, Austria
    Duration: 24 Oct 201727 Oct 2017

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
    Volume10615 LNCS
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

    Conference

    Conference2nd International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2017
    Country/TerritoryAustria
    CityBregenz
    Period24/10/1727/10/17

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