Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2008/082

Improving the Farnel, Threeballot, and Randell-Ryan Voting Schemes

Roberto Araujo and Peter Y. A. Ryan

Abstract: A number of recent voting schemes provide the property of voter verifiability: voters can confirm that their votes are accurately counted in the tally. The Farnel type voting schemes are based on the observation that to achieve voter-verifiability it is not necessary for the voter to carry away a receipt corresponding to their own vote. The Farnel approach then is to provide voters, when they cast their vote, with copies of receipts of one or more randomly selected, previous cast votes. This idea has a number of attractive features: ballot secrecy is achieved up front and does not have to be provided by anonymising mixes etc during tabulation. In fact, plaintext receipts can be used in contrast to the encrypted receipts of many other voter-verifiable schemes. Furthermore, any fears that voters might have that their vote is not truly concealed in an encrypted receipt are mitigated. The Farnel mechanism also mitigates randomization style attacks. In this paper we explore some enhancements to the original Farnel scheme and ways that the Farnel concept can be combined with some existing voter-verifiable schemes, namely Prˆet-`a-Voter, ThreeBallot, and Randell-Ryan.

Category / Keywords: applications / Farnel, election schemes

Date: received 22 Feb 2008

Contact author: rsa at cdc informatik tu-darmstadt de

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Version: 20080227:044618 (All versions of this report)

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