Transparent, Auditable, and Stepwise Verifiable Online E-Voting Enabling an Open and Fair Election

Many e-voting techniques have been proposed but not widely used in reality. One of the problems associated with most existing e-voting techniques is the lack of transparency, leading to a failure to deliver voter assurance. In this work, we propose a transparent, auditable, stepwise verifiable, viewable, and mutual restraining e-voting protocol that exploits the existing multi-party political dynamics such as in the US. The new e-voting protocol consists of three original technical contributions—universal verifiable voting vector, forward and backward mutual lock voting, and in-process check and enforcement—that, along with a public real time bulletin board, resolves the apparent conflicts in voting such as anonymity vs. accountability and privacy vs. verifiability. Especially, the trust is split equally among tallying authorities who have conflicting interests and will technically restrain each other. The voting and tallying processes are transparent/viewable to anyone, which allow any voter to visually verify that his vote is indeed counted and also allow any third party to audit the tally, thus, enabling open and fair election. Depending on the voting environment, our interactive protocol is suitable for small groups where interaction is encouraged, while the non-interactive protocol allows large groups to vote without interaction.