Universal cast-as-intended verifiability

Abstract

In electronic voting, we say that a protocol has cast-asintended verifiability if the contents of each encrypted vote can be audited in order to ensure that they match the voter’s selections. It is traditionally thought that this verification can only be performed by the voter who casts the vote, since only she knows the content of her vote. In this work, we show that this is not the case: we present the first cast-as-intended verification mechanism which is universally verifiable, i.e., the first protocol in which anyone (the voter herself or another party) can check that the contents of an encrypted vote match the voter’s selections. To achieve this goal, we assume the existence of a trusted registrar. We formally define universal cast-as-intended verifiability and we show that our protocol satisfies such property, while also satisfying ballot privacy.We give a general construction of the protocol and an efficient instantiation which is provably secure in the random oracle model. We also present a voting system which can be implemented on top of the voting protocol, which is intended to present a more intuitive process to the voter.