Verifiable Classroom Voting: Where Cryptography Meets Pedagogy

Abstract

In this paper, we propose – and have implemented – the first verifiable classroom voting system. The subject of secure classroom voting has so far received almost no attention from the security community. Though several commercial classroom voting systems have been available, none of them is verifiable. State-of-the-art verifiable voting protocols all rely on finding a set of trustworthy tallying authorities (who are essentially cryptographers and computer experts) in the first place, and hence are completely unsuitable for classroom voting. Our system design is based on “self-enforcing e-voting” – a new paradigm that was first presented at SPW’12 (Hao, Randell and Clarke). A self-enforcing e-voting scheme provides the same End-to-End (E2E) verifiability as other e-voting schemes but without involving any tallying authorities. The removal of tallying authorities brings several compelling advantages in real-world voting scenarios – here, classroom voting is just one example. We have piloted the use of the developed verifiable classroom voting system in real classroom teaching. Based on our preliminary trial experience, we believe the system is not only scientifically valuable, but also pedagogically useful.