24 Nov - Siamak F. Shahandashti - Verifiable e-Voting without Tallying Authorities

Title: Verifiable e-Voting without Tallying Authorities

Speaker: Siamak F. Shahandashti (University of Newcastle)

Abstract: Nearly all verifiable electronic voting systems require trustworthy authorities to perform the tallying operations. This is a direct consequence of requiring ballots to be encrypted to provide vote secrecy and appears to be an indispensable assumption. Motivated by minimizing trust assumptions for verifiable e-voting and simplifying implementations of these systems in practice, I will revisit the necessity of this trust assumption and introduce two polling-station e-voting systems that do not require such tallying authorities. I will give an overview of the ideas underlying the design of each system and discuss the assumptions under which they operate. I conclude with how some of the same ideas can be used to enhance the auditability of classic paper-based voting systems.