Paper 2007/266

Filling the Gap between Voters and Cryptography in e-Voting

Wei Han, Dong Zheng, and Ke-fei Chen

Abstract

Cryptography is an important tool in the design and implementation of electronic voting schemes for it provides the property of verifiability, which is not provided in the traditional voting. But in the real life, neither can most voters understand the profound theory of cryptographic e-voting nor can they perform the complicated cryptographic computation. An e-voting system is presented in this paper to leverage the use of cryptography between theory and practice. It combines the advantages of Moran-Naor's voting scheme and voting schemes based on homomorphic encryption. It makes use of cryptographic techniques, but it hides the details of cryptographic computation from voters. Voters can be convinced that the ballot is cast as intended. The tally can be verified in public. Compared with Moran-Naor's voting scheme, the new system has three advantages: the ballots can be recovered when the voting machine breaks down, the costly cut-and-choose zero-knowledge proofs for shuffling votes made by the voting machine are avoided and the partial tally result in each voting machine is kept secret.

Note: This paper considers a better implementation for Moran-Naor's voting scheme in practice. Some merits in theory are lost but the implementation is simplified, especially in the design of the DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) machine.