Verifiable anonymous vote submission

Abstract

This paper describes a new architecture for supporting the anonymous submission of votes in the REVS voting system. Furthermore, it enables voters to verify during the election that the electoral system processed correctly their anonymously submitted vote. This verification is a weak proof that the vote was effectively considered in the final tally. But since malicious electoral servers have no means to choose which votes should not be considered in the tally, the weak proof is strong enough for ensuring voters that the outcome of the election was not manipulated by the servers towards a particular outcome. In spite have been conceived for the REVS system, our anonymizing architecture can be used in other voting systems as well. The only requirement is that it should be possible to submit the same vote several times and to detect and drop vote replicas at the tallying phase, which is valid for other blind signature voting protocols.