Paper 2016/331

TRVote: A New, Trustworthy and Robust Electronic Voting System

Fatih Tiryakioglu, Mehmet Sabir Kiraz, and Fatih Birinci

Abstract

We propose a new Direct-Recording Electronic (DRE)-based voting system that we call TRVote. The reliability of TRVote is ensured during the vote generation phase where the random challenges are generated by the voters instead of utilizing the random number generator of the machine. Namely, the challenges of voters are utilized to prevent and detect a malicious behavior of a corrupted voting machine. Due to the unpredictability of the challenges, the voting machine cannot cheat voters without being detected. TRVote provides two kinds of verification; "cast-as-intended" is ensured during the vote generation phase and "recorded-as-cast" is ensured through a secure Web Bulletin Board (WBB). More concretely, voters can verify that their votes are cast as intended via a zero-knowledge proof on a printed receipt using QR codes. After the election, the central server broadcasts all receipts in a secure WBB where the voters (or, perhaps proxies) can check whether their receipts appear correctly. In order to implement the voting process, the proposed voting machine has simple components such as mechanical switches, a touchscreen, and a printer. In this system, each candidate is represented by a mechanical switch which is equipped within the voting machine. The machine has a flexible structure in the sense that the mechanical switches can be placed and removed as plug-ins depending on the number of candidates which allows to support arbitrary number of candidates. We show that the proposed system is robust and guarantees privacy of voters. We further analyze that it is universally verifiable and secure against coercion.

Note: Hi, I am the first author of the paper: Fatih Tiryakioglu (fatih.tiryakioglu@tubitak.gov.tr). We updated the paper and want to update the previous version of our paper. Could you update the paper with new one attached above. Regards.