Electronic voting in a large-scale distributed system

In this paper, we propose a practical and secure electronic voting scheme suitable for large-scale distributed systems such as the Internet. As in most of the voting systems in the literature, the proposed voting scheme allows only eligible voters to vote once, protects the voters’ privacy, and ensures the accuracy of the tally. In addition, the proposed scheme satisfies further important criteria, namely, it tolerates abstention and does not require voters to control whether their votes have been correctly processed. If a subset of voters does not vote, the elections cannot be disrupted. Furthermore, anyone, including an external observer, can easily be convinced that the election is fair, that is, that the published final tally is fairly computed from the ballots that were correctly cast. It follows that the proposed voting scheme strengthens the security properties of the electronic voting procedure, simplifies the interaction of voters with the electronic voting system, and contributes to increased voter confidence in the degree of security of the electronic voting procedure. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.