Electronic Voting: Starting Over?

摘要

We solve an 18 year open problem on e-voting. While most research on e-voting is focused on MIX servers, or on homomorphic encryption based schemes, or on blind signatures schemes, the issue raised by Cohen (Benaloh) is usually ignored. Cohen, using a trusted center, developed a yes/no voting scheme in which the outcome is revealed, keeping the tally private. In 1986, Benaloh and Yung posed as open problem how to do this without a trusted center. In this paper, we generalize Cohen's privacy concern in the context of yes/no voting. We allow multiple candidates or write-ins and multi-seat elections in which there is more than one seat to be filled by the election. We study how to announce the winner(s), without revealing the tally. We present schemes for such multi-seat elections satisfying the extra privacy constraint. Our schemes are based on proven secure primitives and do not need a trusted center.