Ballot stuffing and participation privacy in pollsite voting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a protocol for pollsite voting that detects ballot stuffing while preserving voter participation privacy, using a novel zero-knowledge proof technique applicable to existing voting systems.

Contribution

It presents an eligibility audit protocol with a new zero-knowledge proof for reverse set membership, enhancing security and privacy in pollsite voting.

Findings

Detects ballot stuffing without compromising participation privacy.

Compatible with most existing pollsite end-to-end voting protocols.

Introduces an efficient zero-knowledge proof of reverse set membership.

Abstract

We study the problem of simultaneously addressing both ballot stuffing and participation privacy for pollsite voting systems. Ballot stuffing is the attack where fake ballots (not cast by any eligible voter) are inserted into the system. Participation privacy is about hiding which eligible voters have actually cast their vote. So far, the combination of ballot stuffing and participation privacy has been mostly studied for internet voting, where voters are assumed to own trusted computing devices. Such approaches are inapplicable to pollsite voting where voters typically vote bare handed. We present an eligibility audit protocol to detect ballot stuffing in pollsite voting protocols. This is done while protecting participation privacy from a remote observer - one who does not physically observe voters during voting. Our protocol can be instantiated as an additional layer on top of most existing pollsite E2E-V voting protocols. To achieve our guarantees, we develop an efficient zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), that, given a value $v$ and a set $\Phi$ of commitments, proves $v$ is committed by some commitment in $\Phi$, without revealing which one. We call this a ZKP of reverse set membership because of its relationship to the popular ZKPs of set membership. This ZKP may be of independent interest.