Electronic voting with fully distributed trust and maximized flexibility regarding ballot design

Abstract

One common way to ensure the security in voting schemes, is to distribute critical tasks between different entities-the so called trustees. While in most election settings, election authorities perform the task of trustees, elections in small groups such as board elections can be implemented in a way that all voters are also trustees. This is actually the ideal case for an election as trust is fully distributed. A number of voting schemes have been proposed for such elections. Our focus is on a mix net based approach to maximize flexibility regarding ballot design. We proposed and implemented a corresponding voting scheme as Android smartphone application as we believe smartphones are most likely to be used in the considered election settings. Our implementation also enables voters to remotely participate in the voting process. The implementation enables us to measure timings for the tallying phase for different settings in order to analyze whether the chosen mix net based scheme is acceptable for the considered election settings.

Introducing Proxy Voting to Helios

“…Further methods to improve cast-as-intended verifiability in Helios-like protocols have been proposed in the Selene protocol [31], which introduced tracking number appended to the cast votes, and Guasch et al [32], [33] employing designated-verifier proofs. For boardroom voting, an Android application extending and implementing the protocol behind Helios was developed [34]. From the usability perspective, a number of suggestions for the improvements of the current Helios implementation that simplify the audit process for the voters, have been proposed [35], [36].…”

Efficiency Evaluation of Cryptographic Protocols for Boardroom Voting

“…Ritter [10] adapted the technique of homomorphic tallying to the boardroom voting context and proposed two derivations of his protocol tailored towards simple and complex ballots. In similar vein, Kulyk et al [11] adapted the technique of reencryption mix net-based election to the boardroom voting context. Further, Khader et al [12] suggested a boardroom voting protocol building upon self-dissolving commitments.…”

“…We do not take into account the computational complexity of the generation of general public parameters, such as the group used in the calculations or the independent generators of that group. We decided to limit our analysis to the theoretical performance only: while there have been practical implementations of the considered protocols [10,11,14,15], a performance comparison between them is infeasible due to difference in the implementations, such as software architecture, ways of network communication etc. Finally, we provide a performance comparison of all considered protocols within different election settings.…”

“…Further, Khader et al [12] suggested a boardroom voting protocol building upon self-dissolving commitments. These protocols, namely [10,11] and [12] satisfy the proposed security model and are therefore considered in the remainder of this work.…”

“…A new and promising application area of electronic voting is boardroom voting, which in practice takes place very frequently and often on simple issues such as approving or refusing a budget. Hence, it is not a surprise that a number of cryptographic protocols for boardroom voting have been already proposed [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. Generally, such elections are spontaneously initiated and conducted quickly.…”