AN EFFICIENT ELECTION SCHEME FOR RESOLVING TIES

Abstract

In many daily election activities, it is quite often that we have to perform the the voting process more than once to resolve ties, such as several candidate professors may receive the same highest votes when electing the chairman of a department, of several candidate players may tie for the last available position of a national basketball team elected by a group of coaches. With typical electronic election schemes in the literratures, it is necessary to hold the election again to deal with the above situations. In this paper we propose an efficient election scheme to cope with the problem. In the proposed scheme, every voter can obtain an intention attachable vote which contains all possible intensions of the voter, and he just needs to attach his new intention to his previous vote when an extra round of voting is required. Comparing with several possible solutions of the revoting problem, the proposed protocol does not need an extra digital signature scheme for a voter, and it requires only one round of registration action and O(1) storage for every voter.