Verifiable Secret Sharing - Secret Ballot Elections

Secret Ballot Elections

Verifiable secret sharing can be used to build an end-to-end auditable voting systems.

Using the technique of verifiable secret sharing one can satisfy the election problem that will be describe here.
In the election problem each voter can vote 0 (to oppose) or 1 (for favor), and the sum of all votes will determine election's result. For the election to execute, it is needed to make sure that the following conditions will fulfill:

  • The voters' privacy should not be compromised.
  • The election administrator must verify that no voter committed fraud.

If using verifiable secret sharing, n tellers will replace the single election administrator. Each voter will distribute one share of its secret vote to every one of the n tellers. This way the privacy of the voter is preserved and the first condition is satisfied.
Reconstruction of the election's result is easy, if there exist enough k The interactive proof can be generalized slightly to allow verification of the vote shares. Each voter will prove (in the distribution of the secret share phase) to the tellers that his vote is legitimate using the 5 steps of the interactive proof.

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