Anonymous and Coercion-Resistant Distributed Electronic Voting

Abstract

Electronic voting (e-voting) presents a convenient and cost-effective alternative to current paper ballot-based voting. It provides many benefits such as increased voter turnout and accuracy in the decision-making process. While presenting many improvements, e-voting still faces serious security challenges that hinder its adoption. In this paper, we propose a novel remote e-voting scheme that can enhance the integrity, efficiency, and voter turnout of the election process. Our proposed work is secure and preserves the privacy of voters through secure multi-party computations performed by parties of differing allegiances. It also leverages a blockchain running smart contracts as a publicly accessible and tamper-resistant bulletin board to permanently store votes and prevent double-voting. In our security and privacy analysis, we show that our proposed scheme is secure against potential threats and provides voter anonymity. Our performance discussion shows that the proposed scheme is practical for large-scale elections. Index Terms—Remote e-voting, blockchain, smart contract.