A Receipt-Free Punch-Hole Ballot Electronic Voting Scheme

Abstract

The punch-hole ballot electronic voting protocol is a special version of the e-voting paradigms based on homomorphic encryption. Assume that there are L candidates and a voter can select K distinct candidates, the punch-hole ballot is represented as a vector with L elements. The i-th entry of the ballot corresponds to the choice of the voter on the i-th candidate. The tallying authorities sum up components in respective locations of all votes to reveal the votes that are won by each pre-determined candidate. Receipt-freeness is an important security property to protect the election against vote buying and coercion. In this paper a receipt-free punch-hole ballot e-voting scheme is presented. A third party called "randomizer" is employed to re-encrypt the first ballot cast by the voter. The randomizer and the voter jointly generate the final ballot for the tally. Our scheme satisfies the requirements for cryptographic secure electronic voting protocols and is efficient for implementation.