research-article

An analysis of New South Wales electronic vote counting

Authors:

Andrew Conway,

Michelle Blom,

Lee Naish,

Vanessa TeagueAuthors Info & Claims

ACSW '17: Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference

Article No.: 24, Pages 1 - 5

https://doi.org/10.1145/3014812.3014837

Published: 31 January 2017 Publication History

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Abstract

We re-examine the 2012 local government elections in New South Wales, Australia. The count was conducted electronically using a randomised form of the Single Transferable Vote (STV). It was already well known that randomness does make a difference to outcomes in some seats. We describe how the process could be amended to include a demonstration that the randomness was chosen fairly.

Second, and more significantly, we found an error in the official counting software, which caused a mistake in the count in the council of Griffith, where candidate Rina Mercuri narrowly missed out on a seat. We believe the software error incorrectly decreased Mercuri's winning probability to about 10%---according to our count she should have won with 91% probability.

The NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) corrected their code when we pointed out the error, and made their own announcement.

We have since investigated the 2016 local government election (held after correcting the error above) and found two new errors. We notified the NSWEC about these errors a few days after they posted the results.

Cited By

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Ghale MPattinson DKumar RNorrish M(2018)Verified Certificate Checking for Counting VotesVerified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5(69-87)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5
Ghale M(2018)Engineering Software for Modular Formalisation and Verification of STV AlgorithmsFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_35(459-463)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_35
Bennett Moses LGoré RLevy RPattinson DTiwari M(2017)No More Excuses: Automated Synthesis of Practical and Verifiable Vote-Counting Programs for Complex Voting SchemesElectronic Voting10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5(66-83)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5

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Published In

ACSW '17: Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference

January 2017

615 pages

ISBN:9781450347686

DOI:10.1145/3014812

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 31 January 2017

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ACSW 2017

ACSW 2017: Australasian Computer Science Week 2017

January 30 - February 3, 2017

Geelong, Australia

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ACSW '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 78 of 156 submissions, 50%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 204 of 424 submissions, 48%

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Cited By

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Ghale MPattinson DKumar RNorrish M(2018)Verified Certificate Checking for Counting VotesVerified Software. Theories, Tools, and Experiments10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5(69-87)Online publication date: 24-Nov-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03592-1_5
Ghale M(2018)Engineering Software for Modular Formalisation and Verification of STV AlgorithmsFormal Methods and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_35(459-463)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02450-5_35
Bennett Moses LGoré RLevy RPattinson DTiwari M(2017)No More Excuses: Automated Synthesis of Practical and Verifiable Vote-Counting Programs for Complex Voting SchemesElectronic Voting10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5(66-83)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68687-5_5

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