## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2017/616

Statement Voting

Bingsheng Zhang and Hong-Sheng Zhou

Abstract: In this work, we introduce a new concept, {\em statement voting}. Statement voting can be viewed as a natural extension of traditional candidate voting. Instead of defining a fixed election candidate, each voter can define a statement in his or her ballot but leave the vote undefined'' during the voting phase. During the tally phase, the (conditional) actions expressed in the statement will be carried out to determine the final vote.

We provide a comprehensive study of this new concept: under the Universal Composability (UC) framework, we define a class of ideal functionalities for statement voting, and then construct several protocols for realizing these functionalities. Since statement voting covers liquid democracy as a special case, our constructions immediately provide us the first solutions to liquid democracy. We remark that our statement voting can be extended to enable more complex voting and generic ledger-based non-interactive multi-party computation. We believe that the statement voting concept opens a door for constructing a new class of e-voting schemes.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols

Date: received 24 Jun 2017, last revised 21 Sep 2017

Contact author: hongsheng zhou at gmail com

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: A preliminary version of this work was presented as a brief announcement at the 36th The ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC).

Short URL: ia.cr/2017/616

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