BitBallot: Atomic Display Integrity for Verifiable Public Elections at Scale

Abstract

BitBallot: Final Proposal Summary Overview This document presents the final architectural design of BitBallot, an electronic voting system engineered for legally binding public elections under explicit institutional and physical deployment assumptions. Architectural Innovation BitBallot addresses long-standing limitations of end-to-end verifiable voting by separating cryptographic enforcement from institutional responsibility. * Execution Model: Rather than relying on trusted execution environments (TEEs), specialized hardware, or application logic embedded in the consensus layer, the system enforces correctness through verifiable programs (vProgs) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). Infrastructure: It utilizes a public Layer-1 blockchain solely as a neutral substrate for ordering and finality. Core Contribution: Atomic Display Integrity (ADI) The central breakthrough of BitBallot is Atomic Display Integrity (ADI)—a protocol-level security property that: Cryptographically binds voter intent, interface display, and recorded ballots. Ensures a single atomic authorization event at the moment of confirmation. Maintains integrity even under re-voting semantics. Strategic Advantage: Combined with last-vote-valid voting and terminal-complete zero-knowledge tallying, BitBallot achieves strong privacy, public verifiability, and resistance to coercion without intermediate information leakage. Practical Deployment BitBallot is purpose-built for deployment on commodity hardware within supervised polling environments. Cost & Complexity: By avoiding trusted execution environments and specialized cryptographic hardware, the system significantly reduces operational complexity and deployment costs. Security: Despite using standard hardware, it preserves rigorous security guarantees through its underlying protocol design. Conclusion Together, these design choices demonstrate that large-scale, verifiable public elections can be implemented using architectures that are both cryptographically sound and institutionally realistic.