Secure Remote Voting Using Paper Ballots

Abstract: Internet voting will probably be one of the most significant achievements of the future information society. It will have an enormous impact on the election process making it fast, reliable and inexpensive. Nonetheless, so far remote voting is considered to be very difficult, as one has to take into account susceptibility of the voter's PC to various cyber-attacks. As a result, most the research effort is put into developing protocols and machines for poll-site electronic voting. Although these solutions yield promising results, they cannot be directly adopted to Internet voting because of secure platform problem. However, the cryptographic components they utilize may be very useful. This paper presents a scheme based on combination of mixnets and homomorphic encryption borrowed from robust poll-site voting, along with techniques recommended for remote voting -- code sheets and test ballots. The protocol tries to minimize the trust put in voter's PC by making the voter responsible for manual encryption of his vote. To achieve this, the voter obtains a paper ballot that allows him to scramble the vote by performing simple operations (lookup in a table). Creation of paper ballots, as well as decryption of votes, is performed by a group of cooperating trusted servers. As a result, the scheme is characterized by strong asymmetry -- all computations are carried out on the server side. In consequence it does not require any additional hardware on the voter's side, and offers distributed trust, receipt-freeness and verifiability.