Distributed Protocols at the Rescue for Trustworthy Online Voting

While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online voting protocols and recall therefore their security concepts with its trust assumptions. Inspired by the Bitcoin protocol, the prospects of distributed online voting protocols are analysed. No trusted authority is assumed to ensure ballot secrecy. Further, the integrity of the voting is enforced by all voters themselves and without a weakest link, the protocol becomes more robust. We introduce a taxonomy of notions of distribution in online voting protocols that we apply on selected online voting protocols. Accordingly, blockchain-based protocols seem to be promising for online voting due to their similarity with paper-based protocols

The Not-So-Secret Ballot: How Washington Fails to Provide a Secret Vote for Impaired Voters as Required by the Washington State Constitution

Secrecy in voting ensures that elections represent the true will of the people by permitting a voter to freely express his or her convictions without fear of even the most subtle form of influence, ridicule, intimidation, corruption, or coercion. Article VI, section 6 of the Washington State Constitution protects this secrecy by requiring the legislature to provide every voter with a method of voting that will secure absolute secrecy in preparing and casting his or her ballot. To that end, Washington election law requires that new technology be implemented by January 1, 2006 to provide visually impaired voters with a secret vote to the extent feasible. However, no similar provision exists for manually impaired voters. Manually impaired voters include a wide range of individuals who lack the manual dexterity to complete a paper ballot, such as amputees and individuals with cerebral palsy. Manually impaired voters must waive their constitutional right to vote in secret and instead must disclose their selections to a third party, usually in an open polling place where not only the person assisting the voter hears the selection, but so does everyone in the vicinity. Voting technology now exists and is approved for use in Washington that allows manually impaired voters to vote in secret. This Comment argues that in light of the plain language of the constitution, the framers\u27 intent in requiring absolute secrecy, and persuasive precedent from other jurisdictions, the Washington State Constitution requires that the legislature provide for secrecy in voting to the extent feasible. By failing to provide a secret vote for manually impaired voters to the extent feasible, the Washington legislature has not complied with the requirements of article VI, section 6

Koinonia: verifiable e-voting with long-term privacy

Despite years of research, many existing e-voting systems do not adequately protect voting privacy. In most cases, such systems only achieve "immediate privacy", that is, they only protect voting privacy against today's adversaries, but not against a future adversary, who may possess better attack technologies like new cryptanalysis algorithms and/or quantum computers. Previous attempts at providing long-term voting privacy (dubbed "everlasting privacy" in the literature) often require additional trusts in parties that do not need to be trusted for immediate privacy. In this paper, we present a framework of adversary models regarding e-voting systems, and analyze possible threats to voting privacy under each model. Based on our analysis, we argue that secret-sharing based voting protocols offer a more natural and elegant privacy-preserving solution than their encryption-based counterparts. We thus design and implement Koinonia, a voting system that provides long-term privacy against powerful adversaries and enables anyone to verify that each ballot is well-formed and the tallying is done correctly. Our experiments show that Koinonia protects voting privacy with a reasonable performance