An Anonymous Voting Scheme based on Confirmation Numbers

Abstract

This paper proposes a new electronic voting (e-voting) scheme that fulfills all the security requirements of e-voting i.e. privacy, accuracy, universal verifiability, fairness, receipt-freeness, incoercibility, dispute-freeness, robustness, practicality and scalability; usually some of which are found to be traded. When compared with other existing schemes, this scheme requires much more simple computations and weaker assumptions about trustworthiness of individual election authorities. The key mechanism is the one that uses confirmation numbers involved in individual votes to make votes verifiable while disabling all entities including voters themselves to know the linkages between voters and their votes. Many existing e-voting schemes extensively deploy zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) to achieve verifiability. However, ZKP is expensive and complicated. The confirmation numbers attain the verifiability requirement in a much more simple and intuitive way, then the scheme becomes scalable and practical.