SOC Voting and Election Operations Research

EAC Election Operations Assessment

SOC was competitively selected to lead the an Elections Operations Assessment by the U.S Elections Assistance Commission (EAC) in September 2008. The final report was delivered in April 2010 and is awaiting final release by the EAC. The following links to the interim report that is posted on the EAC web site.

· EAC Elections Operation Assessment, Phase II, February 2010

Supporting Voting System Certification for Military Voters

SOC investigators participated in the first-ever security review of a cryptographic voting system in support of a federal election on invitation of the Florida Department of State. Alec Yasinsac and Meador Inge were members of the security and code review team that analyzed the system developed by members of the Operation BRAVO Foundation and the voting system vendor Scytl in support of the Okaloosa Distance Balloting Pilot. The final report can be found at the following URL:

· Software Review and Security Analysis of Scytl Remote Voting Software, September 19, 2008

Elections Security Publications

1.  Alec Yasinsac and Michael Shamos, Guest Editors, “E-Voting Security”, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, Vol. 10, No. 5, Sept/Oct. 2012

2. Todd Andel and Alec Yasinsac, "Secure Internet Voting Protocol for Overseas Military Voters", the Twentieth International Workshop on Security Protocols, April 11-13th, 2012 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK, LNCS (to appear)

3. Harold Pardue, Jeff Landry, and Alec Yasinsac, “E-Voting Risk Assessment: A Threat Tree for Direct Recording Electronic Systems,” International Journal of Information Security and Privacy (IJISP), Vol. 4, Issue #3 (2011), pp. 19-35

4. Yasinsac, A, and Pardue, H, “Voting System Risk Assessment: A Process Using Threat Trees,” Journal of Information Systems Applied Research, Vol. 4, Issue #1, April 2011

5. Todd Andel and Alec Yasinsac, "Secure Internet Voting Protocol for Overseas Military Voters", accepted to the Twentieth International Workshop on Security Protocols, April 11-13th, 2012 at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK

6. Alec Yasinsac, "Did Your Mailed Ballot Count: The Unrecognized Unreliability of Voting By Mail," The 9th International Conference on Politics and Information Systems, Technologies and Applications, July 19th - July 22nd, 2011

7. Alec Yasinsac, "Comparative Risk Analysis: Using Technology to Make Military Members First Class Voters," 2nd International Conference on Society and Information Technologies, March 27-30, 2011

8. Alec Yasinsac, "Insider Threats to Voting Systems," Workshop on Governance of Technology, Information, and Policies (GTIP), December 7, 2010

9. Harold Pardue and Alec Yasinsac, "Voting System Risk Assessment Using Threat Trees," accepted to the 2010 Conference on Information Systems Applied Research, October 28-31, 2010

10. J. Harold Pardue, Alec Yasinsac, and Jeffrey P. Landry, "Towards Internet Voting Security: A Threat Tree for Risk Assessment," accepted to the International Conference on Risks and Security of Internet and Systems 2010, October 10-13, 2010

11. Harold Pardue, Jeff Landry, and Alec Yasinsac, "A Risk Assessment Model for Voting Systems using Threat Trees and Monte Carlo Simulation", First International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for E-voting Systems, Atlanta, Georgia, USA Monday, August 31st, 2009

12. Sean Piesert, Matt Bishop, and Alec Yasinsac, "Vote Selling, Voter Anonymity, and Forensic Logging of Electronic Voting Machines," 42st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,  January 5-8, 2009

13. Alec Yasinsac and Matt Bishop, “The Dynamics of Counting and Recounting Votes”, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine, May-June 2008, Volume: 6, Issue: 3, pp. 22-29

14. Alec Yasinsac and Matt Bishop, “Of Paper Trails and Voter Receipts”, Proceedings of the 41st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences,  January 7-10, 2008

Alec Yasinsac

Dr. Alec Yasinsac is Professor and Dean, School of Computing, University of South Alabama. He has thirty years experience in application development, mainframe operating systems, and network engineering and has published over fifty refereed workshop, conference, and journal papers on information security. Alec served in the Marines for twenty years and received his doctorate from the University of Virginia where he was on faculty as the Marine Officer Instructor. He was on the Advisory Board for the 2007 National Academy of Engineering 2007 National Meeting Symposium On Electronic Voting and he led the first ever academic source code review in support of a federal election audit for the 2006 Florida United States Congressional District 13 race. He routinely contributes to national meetings and panels that address voting system security issues. As a retired Marine, he takes special interest in military voting issues.

His voting system security research web page can be found at the following URL.

· Yasinsac Voting System Research Page

Harold Pardue

Dr. Harold Pardue is a Professor of Information Sciences in the School of Computing, University of South Alabama. He was investigator on the Elections Operation Assessment and was lead scientist in developing the Threat Instance Risk Analyzer (TIRA) that resulted from that project. He has published papers on voting system risk.

Jeff Landry

Dr. Jeff Landry is a Professor of Information Sciences in the School of Computing, University of South Alabama. He was investigator on the Elections Operation Assessment and was lead scientist in developing the threat matrices that resulted from that project.

Bob Sweeney

Dr. Bob Sweeney is a Professor of Information Sciences in the School of Computing, University of South Alabama. He was investigator on the Elections Operation Assessment and was lead scientist in developing the Threat Instance Risk Analyzer (TIRA) that resulted from that project.