Eletronic Jury Voting

Abstract:

This talk elicits the fact that all current proposals for electronic voting schemes disclose the final tally of the votes. In certain situations, like jury voting, this may be undesirable. We present a robust and universally verifiable Membership Testing Scheme (MTS) that allows, among other things, a collection of voters to cast votes and determine whether their tally belongs to some pre-specified set (e.g., exceeds a given threshold) --- our scheme discloses no additional information than that implied from the knowledge of such membership. We discuss several extensions of our basic MTS. All the constructions presented combine features of two parallel lines of research concerning electronic voting schemes, those based on MIX--networks and in homomorphic encryption.

Joint work with Alejandro Hevia (U. California, San Diego & U. Chile)