A Public Verifiable Security-Enhanced Voting Protocol for a Committee Board Meeting

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the design of an electronic voting protocol used in critical elections at the meeting of board of a company or a parliamentary committee. The number of participating voters is limited to several hundreds but the security requirement is expanded that the accumulated vote-count of each candidate should be kept as secret as possible. Most former electronic voting frameworks simply take the announcement of vote-counts for granted and neglect the privacy aspect of this part, therefore, they are not applicable directly. In the proposed protocol, the ElGamal cryptosystem is used with its nice homomorphic property. An electronic bulletin board is used to hold public announced values during the protocol. A ballot includes separate encrypted ‘yes’/’no’ vote for each candidate such that the accumulated votecounts can be concealed in the secret comparison algorithm. The secrecy goals of this protocol are achieved not only by the design that each encrypted ballot is never decrypted but also by the deliberately designed comparison algorithm, in which a ‘mixand- match’ sub-protocol is utilized.