Secure Order Based Voting Using Distributed Tallying

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure, distributed order-based voting protocol that ensures ballot secrecy and can be practically implemented in large-scale electronic elections, enhancing voter confidence.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel secure voting protocol for order-based rules using distributed tallying and secure multiparty computation, ensuring perfect ballot secrecy.

Findings

Protocol guarantees perfect ballot secrecy

Demo implementation shows practical feasibility

System suitable for large-scale elections

Abstract

Electronic voting systems have significant advantages in comparison with physical voting systems. One of the main challenges in e-voting systems is to secure the voting process: namely, to certify that the computed results are consistent with the cast ballots and that the voters' privacy is preserved. We propose herein a secure voting protocol for elections that are governed by order-based voting rules. Our protocol, in which the tallying task is distributed among several independent talliers, offers perfect ballot secrecy in the sense that it issues only the required output while no other information on the cast ballots is revealed. Such perfect secrecy, achieved by employing secure multiparty computation tools, may increase the voters' confidence and, consequently, encourage them to vote according to their true preferences. We implemented a demo of a voting system that is based on our protocol and we describe herein the system's components and its operation. Our implementation demonstrates that our secure order-based voting protocol can be readily implemented in real-life large-scale electronic elections.