Encryption Mechanisms for Receipt-Free and Perfectly Private Verifiable Elections

We design new encryption mechanisms that enable the design of the first universally verifiable voting schemes, supporting both receipt-freeness and everlasting privacy without assuming the existence of an anonymous channel.

Our schemes support the two most traditional election tallying methods: One is additively homomorphic, supporting elections in which votes simply need to be added, but decryption is only efficient for a message space of polylogarithmic size. The other is randomizable, is compatible with traditional mixnet-based tallying methods, and supports efficient message encoding, which makes it compatible with virtually any election type.

Our approach builds on the recently proposed traceable receipt-free encryption (TREnc) primitive to support the design of a perfectly private audit trail. In particular, we propose two TREnc that are secure under SXDH and rely on a public coin CRS (or on the random oracle model). This improves on previous TREnc mechanisms that required a structured CRS and is of independent interest. A prototype implementation of our mechanisms is proposed, which shows that ballot preparation and verification can be executed in less than a second.