In this paper we present a new multi-authority secret-ballot election scheme that guarantees privacy, universal veri ability, and robustness. It is the rst scheme for which the performance is optimal in the sense that time and communication complexity is minimal both for the individual voters and the authorities. An interesting property of the scheme is that the time and communication complexity for the voter is independent of the number of authorities. A voter simply posts a single encrypted message accompanied by a compact proof that it contains a valid vote. Our result is complementary to the result by Cramer, Franklin, Schoenmakers, and Yung in the sense that in their scheme the work for voters is linear in the number of authorities but can be instantiated to yield information-theoretic privacy, while in our scheme the voter's e ort is independent of the number of authorities but always provides computational privacy-protection. We will also point out that the majority of proposed voting schemes provide computational privacy only (often without even considering the lack of information-theoretic privacy), and that our new scheme is by far superior to those schemes.
The computational load of the voters then grows linearly with the number of authorities, which motivated the consecutive proposal by Cramer, Gennaro and Schoenmakers of a scheme that offers a computationally private audit trail but a work load for the voters that is independent of the number of authorities REF .
A Secure and Optimally Efficient Multi-Authority Election Scheme
EUROCRYPT
Computer Science