Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2007/162

Bingo Voting: Secure and coercion-free voting using a trusted random number generator

Jens-Matthias Bohli and Joern Mueller-Quade and Stefan Roehrich

Abstract: It is debatable if current direct-recording electronic voting machines can sufficiently be trusted for a use in elections. Reports about malfunctions and possible ways of manipulation abound. Voting schemes have to fulfill seemingly contradictory requirements: On one hand the election process should be verifiable to prevent electoral fraud and on the other hand each vote should be deniable to avoid coercion and vote buying.

This work presents a new verifiable and coercion-free voting scheme Bingo Voting, which is based on a trusted random number generator. As a motivation for the new scheme two coercion/vote buying attacks on voting schemes are presented which show that it can be dangerous to let the voter contribute randomness to the voting scheme.

A proof-of-concept implementation of the scheme shows the practicality of the scheme: all costly computations can be moved to a non time critical pre-voting phase.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / secure electronic voting, coercion-free, receipt-free

Publication Info: VOTE-ID 2007

Date: received 3 May 2007, last revised 12 Sep 2007

Contact author: sr at ira uka de

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20070912:103404 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2007/162