Audit-or-Cast: Enforcing Honest Elections with Privacy-Preserving Public Verification
Aman Rojjha, Gaurang Tandon, Varul Srivastava, Kannan Srinathan
TLDR
ACE protocol ensures honest, privacy-preserving elections with public verifiability and no trusted clients.
Key contributions
- Introduces ACE, a voting protocol combining public auditability with strong voter privacy.
- Uses tally-hiding aggregation and Audit-or-Cast challenge for cast-as-intended assurance.
- Employs tallier-side re-randomization to prevent vote-linking and ensure receipt-freeness.
- Achieves end-to-end verifiability without relying on trusted clients or revealing vote distributions.
Why it matters
This paper advances election security by enabling public verification without compromising voter privacy or requiring trusted devices, addressing key real-world deployment challenges.
Original Abstract
Electronic voting systems must balance public verifiability with voter privacy and coercion resistance. Existing cryptographic protocols typically achieve end-to-end verifiability by revealing vote distributions, relying on trusted clients, or enabling transferable receipts - design choices that often compromise trust or privacy in real-world deployments. We present ACE, a voting protocol that reconciles public auditability with strong privacy guarantees. The protocol combines a publicly verifiable, tally-hiding aggregation mechanism with an Audit-or-Cast challenge that enforces cast-as-intended even under untrusted client assumptions. Tallier-side re-randomization eliminates persistent links between voters and public records, yielding information-theoretic receipt-freeness assuming at least one honest tallier. We formalize the security of ACE and show that it simultaneously achieves end-to-end verifiability, publicly tally-hiding results, and strong receipt-freeness without trusted clients.
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