Robust Verifiable non-Interactive Zero-Sharing - A Plug-in Utility for Enhanced Voters' Privacy

Strong ballot secrecy is a fundamental property of a voting system. Traditional elections, through voter isolation, ensure that this fundamental property is satisfied convincingly. Unfortunately, in the e-voting domain, achieving strong voter privacy proved to be a much more challenging goal. In the current state of the art e-voting schemes, voter privacy relies on honesty of a quorum of authorities, namely assumptions of the form “a certain number of authorities do not collude against the privacy of the voters.” Although sufficient in some settings, these assumptions do not capture voter privacy as it is understood ideally. In this work we present a “voting utility” called Robust Verifiable Non-Interactive Zero-Sharing. Our utility can be seamlessly integrated in large scale “homomorphic encryption” based e-voting schemes, and enables a set of voters to protect the privacy of their votes, even in settings where all authorities may be dishonest and try to violate voter’s privacy.

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