Multi-Authority Secret-Ballot Elections with Linear Work

Abstract

Abstract. We present new cryptographic protocols for multi-authority secret ballot elections that guarantee privacy, robustness, and universal verifiability. Application of some novel techniques, in particular the construction of witness hiding/indistinguishable protocols from Cramer, Damgård and Schoenmakers, and the verifiable secret sharing scheme of Pedersen, reduce the work required by the voter or an authority to a linear number of cryptographic operations in the population size (compared to quadratic in previous schemes). Thus we get significantly closer to a practical election scheme.

Electronic Voting in the Netherlands: From Early Adoption to Early Abolishment

“…This is exactly what homomorphic encryption achieves (see e.g. [7,8,16]). For example, we may multiply all the encrypted votes to ensure that if we decrypt the result, this represents the addition of the original votes.…”

A Simple Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing Scheme and Its Application to Electronic Voting

“…It turns out that the PVSS scheme exactly matches the discrete log setting and assumptions required for the remainder of the election scheme. The resulting scheme combines several of the advantages of previous election schemes, and fits conceptually between the schemes of [CFSY96] and [CGS97]. It achieves the same set of security properties as these schemes.…”

“…It is possible to instantiate the scheme of [CFSY96] to get the same type of scheme. Recall that [CFSY96] requires a private channel from each of the voters to each of the talliers.…”

“…Recall that [CFSY96] requires a private channel from each of the voters to each of the talliers. By replacing the private channels by public key encryption, the information-theoretic privacy for the voters is lost, but a scheme is obtained that also avoids the use of a shared-key generation protocol.…”

On Some Incompatible Properties of Voting Schemes

“…In [5], Cramer et al propose a voting scheme that guarantees the unconditional privacy, by using unconditionally secure homomorphic commitments, but only with respect to the voters, and not to the authorities, which would be able to open each individual vote if they all collude.…”