SOBA: Secrecy-preserving Observable Ballot-level Audit
Josh Benaloh, Douglas Jones, Eric Lazarus, Mark Lindeman, and Philip, B. Stark

TL;DR
SOBA is an election verification method that ensures result accuracy and privacy by combining contest-specific vote record publication, cryptographic ballot mapping, and risk-limiting audits to detect discrepancies and prevent incorrect outcomes.
Contribution
It introduces a novel combination of contest-specific CVR publication, cryptographic ballot shrouding, and risk-limiting audits for secure, privacy-preserving election verification.
Findings
Provides high-confidence election result verification
Ensures privacy through cryptographic ballot shrouding
Guarantees detection of incorrect outcomes with high probability
Abstract
SOBA is an approach to election verification that provides observers with justifiably high confidence that the reported results of an election are consistent with an audit trail ("ballots"), which can be paper or electronic. SOBA combines three ideas: (1) publishing cast vote records (CVRs) separately for each contest, so that anyone can verify that each reported contest outcome is correct, if the CVRs reflect voters' intentions with sufficient accuracy; (2) shrouding a mapping between ballots and the CVRs for those ballots to prevent the loss of privacy that could occur otherwise; (3) assessing the accuracy with which the CVRs reflect voters' intentions for a collection of contests while simultaneously assessing the integrity of the shrouded mapping between ballots and CVRs by comparing randomly selected ballots to the CVRs that purport to represent them. Step (1) is related to work by…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInternet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques · Cryptography and Data Security
