Anonymous voting protocol

Abstract

Voting plays an important role in human civilization, but conventional paper voting is time consuming, inconvenient, and expensive, especially when voters and the administrator are geographically distributed. With the rapid expansion of internet, electronic voting seems to be a good alternative. But due to the inherent lack of security of the internet, we need a very careful design of the protocol in order to achieve both security and anonymity. In this project, we will design an anonymous voting protocol that can achieve the following requirements: (I) only authorized voters can vote; (II) no one can vote more than once; (III) secrecy of the voter is maintained; (VI) no one can duplicate anyone else’s vote; (V) the tally is computed correctly; (IV) everyone is able to check (V). A historical review on electronic voting will be covered in this report, and we will discuss three kinds of schemes: Blind signatures & anonymous channels, Multi-authority & secret sharing, Homomorphic encryption. Our protocol design in this project will focus on the first one, but we also provide a protocol using a combination of the latter two in Appendix.