OpenVoting: Recoverability from Failures in Dual Voting

TL;DR

OpenVoting is a dual voting protocol that enables recovery from election failures by identifying error-free votes and their sources, combining cryptographic guarantees with simple paper-based verification.

Contribution

The paper introduces OpenVoting, a novel protocol that allows recovery from election failures without re-running the entire process, integrating cryptographic and paper-based verification.

Findings

Identifies verifiable error-free votes and their sources.

Enables recovery from election failures without full reruns.

Maintains simplicity for voters with minimal cognitive load.

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of recovery from failures without re-running entire elections when elections fail to verify. We consider the setting of \emph{dual voting} protocols, where the cryptographic guarantees of end-to-end verifiable voting (E2E-V) are combined with the simplicity of audit using voter-verified paper records (VVPR). We first consider the design requirements of such a system and then suggest a protocol called \emph{OpenVoting}, which identifies a verifiable subset of error-free votes consistent with the VVPRs, and the polling booths corresponding to the votes that fail to verify with possible reasons for the failures. To an ordinary voter \emph{OpenVoting} looks just like an old fashioned paper based voting system, with minimal additional cognitive overload.