IACR News item: 14 November 2015
Peter Y A Ryan andPeter B Roenne, Vincenzo Iovino
ePrint Reportvote is accurately included in the tally. While this may be technically valid, from a public acceptance standpoint is
may be problematic: many voters may not really understand the purpose of the encrypted ballot and the various checks that they
can perform. In this paper we take a different approach and
revisit an old idea: to provide each voter with a private tracking number. Votes are posted on a bulletin board in
the clear along with their associated
tracking number.
This is appealing in that it provides voters with a very simple, intuitive way to verify their
vote, in the clear.
However, there are obvious drawbacks: we must ensure that no two voters are assigned the same tracker and we need to keep the trackers private.
In this paper, we propose a scheme that addresses both of these problems: we ensure that voters get unique
trackers and we close
off the coercer\'s window of opportunity by ensuring that the voters only learn their tracking numbers after
votes have been posted. The resulting
scheme provides receipt-freeness, and indeed a good level of coercion-resistance while also providesinga more immediately understandable form of
verifiability. The cryptographyis under the bonnet as far as the voter is concerned.
The basic scheme still has a problem in some contexts: if the coercer is himself a voter there is a chance
that the coerced voter might light on the coercer\'s tracker, or the coercer simply claims that it is his.
We argue that in many contexts this may be an acceptable threat when weighed against the more transparent verification
provided by the scheme. Nonetheless, we
describe some elaborations of the basic scheme to mitigate such threats.
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