Pretty Good Democracy for a variety of voting schemes

Code voting seeks to address the issues of privacy and integrity for Remote Internet Voting. It sidesteps many of the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet and client platforms but it does not provide end-to-end verification that votes are counted as cast. In this paper, we propose a simple technique to enhance the verifiability of code voting by ensuring that the Vote Server can only access the acknowledgement codes if the vote code is correctly registered by a threshold set of Trustees. The mechanism adds an extra level of verifiability in registering and counting the vote. Voter-verification is simple and direct: the voters need only check that the acknowledgement code returned to them agrees with the value on their code sheet. To ensure receipt-freeness we propose the use of a single acknowledgement code per code sheet, rather than individual acknowledgement codes for each candidate as with usual code voting.

I will first present Pretty Good Democracy for voting schemes in which the voter selects a single candidate, then show how it can be extended to more expressive voting schemes such as Borda, approval voting and STV.

(Joint work with Peter Ryan, University of Luxembourg, and James Heather, University of Surrey.)