Efficient receipt-free voting based on homomorphic encryption

Abstract

Voting schemes that provide receipt-freeness prevent voters from proving their cast vote, and hence thwart vote-buying and coercion. We analyze the security of the multi-authority voting protocol of Benaloh and Tuinstra and demonstrate that this protocol is not receiptfree, opposed to what was claimed in the paper and was believed before. Furthermore, we propose the first practicable receipt-free voting scheme. Its only physical assumption is the existence of secret one-way communication channels from the authorities to the voters, and due to the public verifiability of the tally, voters only join a single stage of the protocol, realizing the "vote-and-go" concept. The protocol combines the advantages of the receipt-free protocol of Sako and Kilian and of the very efficient protocol of Cramer, Gennaro, and Schoenmakers, with help of designated-verifier proofs of Jakobsson, Sako, and Impagliazzo. Compared to the receipt-free protocol of Sako and Kilian for security parameter ℓ (the number of repetitions in the non-interactive cut-andchoose proofs), the protocol described in this paper realizes an improvement of the total bit complexity by a factor ℓ.