Secure Order Based Voting Using Distributed Tallying

TL;DR

A secure voting protocol for elections that are governed by order-based voting rules that offers perfect ballot secrecy, in which the tallying task is distributed among several independent talliers, which may increase the voters' confidence and encourage them to vote according to their true preferences.

Abstract

Electronic voting systems have significant advantages in comparison with physical voting systems. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots and that the voters' privacy is preserved. We propose herein a secure voting protocol for elections that are governed by order-based voting rules. Our protocol, in which the tallying task is distributed among several independent talliers, offers perfect ballot secrecy in the sense that it issues only the required output while no other information on the cast ballots is revealed. Such perfect secrecy, achieved by employing secure multiparty computation tools, may increase the voters' confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. We implemented a demo of a voting system that is based on our protocol and we describe herein the system's components and its operation. Our implementation demonstrates that our secure order-based voting protocol can be readily implemented in real-life large-scale electronic elections.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: A high-level description of the protocol.
• Figure 2: A high-level block diagram of the demo's system.
• Figure 3: Election creation form
• Figure 4: Voting page
• Figure 5: Runtimes (milliseconds) for validating a single ballot in each of the two rules, as a function of the number of candidates, $M$, and number of talliers, $D$.

Theorems & Definitions (8)

• Theorem 1
• Theorem 2
• Lemma 3
• proof
• Theorem 4
• proof
• Lemma 5
• proof