Secure and Privacy-Preserving Proxy Voting System

Abstract

Voting is a frequent and popular decision making process in many diverse areas, targeting the fields of e-Government, e-Participation, e-Business, etc. In e-Business, voting processes may be carried out e.g. in order management, inventory management, or production management. In this field, voting processes are typically based on direct voting. While direct voting enables each eligible voter to express her opinion about a given subject, representative voting shifts this power to elected representatives. Declarative or proxy voting (based on liquid democracy) is a voting process situated in between these two approaches and allows a voter to delegate her voting power to a so called proxy, who actually casts the votes for all the represented voters. The most interesting aspect of this approach is that voters have the opportunity to skip the direct involvement when they trust the proxy to act within their best interest. Liquid democracy and proxy voting has been implemented in various software tools that facilitate the voting process. However, the current systems lack security features typically required by electronic voting systems. Therefore, we present a system that integrates cryptographic functionality and relies on qualified signatures created by the Austrian citizen card to solve the current security issues. This system can support e-Business processes and applications in decision making, enabling the delegation of votes.