Practical remote end-to-end voting scheme

Abstract

Recently, remote voting systems have gained popularity and have been used for government elections and referendums in the United Kingdom, Estonia and Switzerland as well as municipal elections in Canada and party primary elections in the United States and France. Current remote voting schemes assume either the voter's personal computer is trusted or the voter is not physically coerced. In this paper, we present a remote end-to-end voting scheme, in which the voter's choice remains secret even if the voter's personal computer is infected by malware or the voter is physically controlled by the adversary. In particular, our scheme can achieve absolute verifiability even if all election authorities are corrupt. Based on homomorphic encryption, the overhead for tallying in our scheme is linear in the number of candidates. Thus, our scheme is practical for elections at a large scale, such as general elections. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.