vVote: A Verifiable Voting System

Abstract

The Prêt à Voter cryptographic voting system was designed to be flexible and to offer voters a familiar and easy voting experience. In this article, we present our development of the Prêt à Voter design to a practical implementation used in a real state election in November 2014, called vVote. As well as solving practical engineering challenges, we have also had to tailor the system to the idiosyncrasies of elections in the Australian state of Victoria and the requirements of the Victorian Electoral Commission. This article includes general background, user experience, and details of the cryptographic protocols and human processes. We explain the problems, present solutions, then analyze their security properties and explain how they tie in to other design decisions.