Anyscale Connect: Encrypting and Tabulating Big Elections (Dan Wallach, Rice University/VotingWorks)
Source: YouTube · Anyscale · published Dec 19, 2020 · 41:13
Professor Dan Wallach presents "Arlo," a system designed to perform scalable risk-limiting audits for elections by leveraging Ray to parallelize end-to-end cryptographic operations 0:00-0:34.
Key Takeaways:
• Risk-limiting audits (RLAs) use random sampling to verify election results, but end-to-end cryptography like additive homomorphism is required to cryptographically prove that reported margins are correct 1:35-2:24.
• Encrypting ballots is computationally expensive, taking about six seconds per ballot on a desktop, necessitating a cluster computing solution to process millions of ballots within a few hours 9:35-11:23.
• To optimize performance, the speaker improved scalar code (avoiding Pandas iterrows), minimized data transport by writing directly to S3, and used batching to reduce memory pressure on Ray's object store 14:19-15:34, 20:27-22:40.
• Ray Actors were effectively used to manage global state across the cluster, including progress tracking, file integrity hashes, and retry logic for failed network writes 24:36-26:11.
The project successfully piloted in Inyo County, California, encrypting nearly 10,000 ballots in just three minutes, proving the viability of high-performance, open-source election auditing 30:19-31:02.
Sources:
- 0:00-0:34 Introduction to Arlo and the talk's focus
- 1:35-2:24 Explanation of Risk-Limiting Audits
- 9:35-11:23 Scalability challenges and encryption costs
- 14:19-15:34(https://www.youtube.co
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First 800 characters of the transcript
so uh everybody can hear me i hope and i'm very happy to be here with you today this has been my sabbatical long project working with a not-for-profit startup called votingworks and so today i'm going to be telling you if i can share my screen all right so now i hope everybody can see my slides and today i'm going to be telling you about encrypting and tabulating big elections the design of arlo e to e which is the system i've been working on all year and how rey helped save that saved the day so i've used and learned my way through a lot of different ray features this year and i'll be talking a little bit about voting and a lot about scalability and how to make it all come together okay so my research i'm a professor the research that i do normally is all about vulnerabilities in electron…