Practical multi-candidate election system

Abstract

The aim of electronic voting schemes is to provide a set of protocols that allow voters to cast ballots while a group of authorities collect the votes and output the final tally. In this paper we describe a practical multi-candidate election scheme that guarantees privacy of voters, public verifiability, and robustness against a coalition of malicious authorities. Furthermore, we address the problem of receipt-freeness and incoercibility of voters. Our new scheme is based on the Paillier cryptosystem and on some related zero-knowledge proof techniques. The voting schemes are very practical and can be efficiently implemented in a real system.