Verifiable Election

**End-to-end verifiable elections** (E2E-V) are voting systems designed so that anyone—not only election officials—can verify that votes were **cast as intended**, **recorded as cast**, and **tallied as recorded**. These systems aim to maximize transparency and public trust without compromising ballot secrecy - wikipedia

# Concept An end-to-end verifiable election provides each voter with a way to confirm that: 1. Their vote was correctly captured (no vote alteration during submission). 2. Their encrypted vote appears correctly in the public record. 3. The published tally corresponds mathematically to those recorded votes.

This verification can be performed by any interested party using public data, such as cryptographic proofs and open audit logs, without needing to trust the software or election officials.

## Components Typical E2E-V systems use a combination of cryptographic techniques: - **Encryption**: Each vote is encrypted before leaving the voting device. - **Public Bulletin Board**: A publicly accessible log where encrypted votes are posted. - **Homomorphic tallying**: Enables computation of the election result without decrypting individual votes. - Zero-Knowledge Proofs: Demonstrate correctness of decryption and counting without revealing how any individual voted. - **Receipt codes**: Give voters a private way to check that their encrypted vote is included on the bulletin board, without revealing the content of their vote.

# Examples and Research Systems Several academic and pilot systems have demonstrated E2E verifiability: - Rarimo - Scantegrity II (used in Takoma Park, Maryland) added cryptographic confirmation codes to paper ballots. - Helios is an open-source web-based system often used in university and organizational elections. - Prêt à Voter and **Punchscan** introduced early designs that separate vote secrecy from verifiability through structured randomness. - STAR-Vote combined paper ballots with end-to-end verification and modern usability research.

# Benefits E2E verifiable systems: - Eliminate the need to trust election software or insiders. - Allow independent auditing by citizens and observers. - Provide strong mathematical guarantees of integrity and transparency. - Enhance confidence in digital or hybrid voting systems.

# Challenges

Despite their promise, E2E-V systems face obstacles: - **Complexity**: The cryptography can be difficult for voters and election officials to understand. - **Usability**: Balancing verifiability with a simple voting experience remains hard. - **Coercion resistance**: Ensuring voters cannot use receipts to prove how they voted. - **Deployment and policy**: Integrating cryptographic verification into existing election laws and infrastructure.

# Toward Verifiable Democracy End-to-end verifiability reframes democracy as a **publicly auditable computation**. In the long term, such systems may blend with decentralized identity, zero-knowledge proofs, and cryptographic governance models—making democratic processes both transparent and private, scalable from local assemblies to global networks.

# See - End-to-end auditable voting system - wikipedia - eprint.iacr.org - heliosvoting.org