Paper 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.

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).