The Big Brother Ballot

Most electronic voting schemes have been designed for keeping anonymity of voters and nontraceability of votes, since voters' privacy is one of the most important issues. In some votings, however privacy and anonymity cannot be the primary requirement; there can be more significant requirements such as validity for voters, cheating protection, precise tally, universal verifiability, and post revealability. A committee voting in the Parliament or a small group voting in a city council can be such an example. The vote can be revealed after the voting in a certain case, say a court order or an agreement of the revelation. In view of the post revelation, this type of voting has a similarity with open voting by raising hands. Nevertheless, the voting should be secret before opening the ballot box, when it is done in distributed computing environment. Otherwise it may cause opportunistic behaviours and instant collusion, and it may be a threat to the fairness of the voting. It re..