Verifiable and Privacy Preserving Electronic Voting with Untrusted Machines

Abstract

Designing a trustworthy voting system that uses electronic voting machines (EVMs) for efficiency and accuracy is a challenging task. It is difficult, if not impossible, to ensure the trustworthiness of EVMs that possess computation, storage, and communication capabilities. Thus an electronic voting system that does not assume trusted EVMs is clearly desirable. In this paper, we have proposed a k-anonymized electronic voting scheme that achieves this goal by assuming a hardware-controlled trusted random number generator external to the EVM. The proposed scheme relies on a k-anonymization technique to protect privacy and resort to joint de-anonymization of the votes for counting. Since the joint de-anonymization takes into account all the votes, it is difficult to manipulate an individual vote, even by the EVM, without being detected. Besides the anonymization technique, the proposed scheme relies on standard cryptographic hashing and the concept of floating receipt to provide end-to-end verifiability that prevents coercion or vote trading.