Paper 2025/156

TallyGuard: Privacy Preserving Tallied-as-cast Guarantee

Athish Pranav Dharmalingam, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Sai Venkata Krishnan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
KC Sivaramakrishnan, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Tarides
N.S. Narayanaswamy, Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to verifiable vote tallying using additive homomorphism, which can be appended to existing voting systems without modifying the underlying infrastructure. Existing End-to-End Verifiable (E2E-V) systems like Belenios and ElectionGuard rely on distributed trust models or are vulnerable to decryption compromises, making them less suitable for general elections. Our approach introduces a tamper-evident commitment to votes through cryptographic hashes derived from homomorphic encryption schemes such as Paillier. The proposed system provides tallied-as-cast verifiability without revealing individual votes, thereby preventing coercion. The system also provides the ability to perform public verification of results. We also show that this system can be transitioned to quantum-secure encryption like Regev for future-proofing the system. We discuss how to deploy this system in a real-world scenario, including for general political elections, analyzing the security implications and report on the limitations of this system. We believe that the proposed system offers a practical solution to the problem of verifiable vote tallying in general elections.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
Electronic voting machineVoter-verified paper audit trailTallied-as-castHomomorphic encryption
Contact author(s)
athishanna @ gmail com
cs20d408 @ smail iitm ac in
kcsrk @ cse iitm ac in
swamy @ cse iitm ac in
History
2025-02-05: last of 2 revisions
2025-02-01: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/156
License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/156,
      author = {Athish Pranav Dharmalingam and Sai Venkata Krishnan and KC Sivaramakrishnan and N.S. Narayanaswamy},
      title = {{TallyGuard}: Privacy Preserving Tallied-as-cast Guarantee},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/156},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/156}
}
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