vVote: a Verifiable Voting System

TL;DR

This paper presents vVote, an adaptation of the cryptographic Pret a Voter voting system tailored for Australian elections, demonstrating its security, usability, and practical application in real-world voting scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a practical implementation of an end-to-end verifiable voting protocol adapted for Australian elections, including security analysis and user experience considerations.

Findings

vVote successfully implemented in real elections

Cryptographic protocols ensure vote verifiability

User experience aligns with electoral requirements

Abstract

The Pret a Voter cryptographic voting system was designed to be flexible and to offer voters a familiar and easy voting experience. In this paper we present a case study of our efforts to adapt Pret a Voter to the idiosyncrasies of elections in the Australian state of Victoria. This technical report includes general background, user experience and details of the cryptographic protocols and human processes. We explain the problems, present solutions, then analyse their security properties and explain how they tie in to other design decisions. We hope this will be an interesting case study on the application of end-to-end verifiable voting protocols to real elections. A preliminary version of this paper appeared as the 10th February 2014 version of "Draft Technical Report for VEC vVote System". The team involved in developing the vVote design described in this report were: Craig Burton, Chris Culnane, James Heather, Rui Joaquim, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve Schneider and Vanessa Teague.