e-Voting: I Changed My Mind, Now What?

Abstract

Voting is the foundation of a democratic society. In most countries, citizens have to go physically to elections, i.e., to a voting booth to make their decisions with pen and paper. In crisis, like pandemics, war times and other catastrophes, this may be impossible. But there are other examples, like concurrent events on the election day, that create problems. For example, in Berlin, on 2021 German election day, the city marathon took place on the same day, which lead to traffic jams that hindered timely delivery of voting paper.

A solution to these challenges is electronic voting (E-Voting), where people can vote digitally from home on a specific device (or even on their smartphones). Actually, IT security mechanisms, like blind signatures, anonymity networks, homomorphic encryption and zero Knowledge Proofs exist, to name just a few, which have already been combined to create secure E-Voting infrastructures. We want to enhance these solutions with an additional feature we call ballot-changing. The three main benefits of our architecture are, firstly, limiting Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), secondly, the possibility of changing one’s previous vote (ballot-changing), and thirdly, individual auditability, i.e., every voter can make sure that the election result is correct and that their vote has been counted.