Filling the gap between voters and cryptography in e-voting

Cryptography is an important tool in the design and implementation of e-voting schemes since it can provide verifiability, which is not provided in the traditional voting. But in the real life, most voters can neither understand the profound theory of cryptography nor perform the complicated cryptographic computation. An e-voting system is presented in this paper to leverage the use of cryptography. It combines the advantages of voting scheme of Moran-Naor and voting scheme based on homomorphic encryption. It makes use of the cryptographic technique, but it hides the details of cryptographic computation from voters. Compared with voting scheme of Moran-Naor, the new system has three advantages: the ballots can be recovered when the voting machine breaks down, the costly cut-and-choose zero-knowledge proofs for shuffling votes made by the voting machine are avoided and the partial tally result in each voting machine can be kept secret. Foundation item: the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 60673076) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program (863) of China (No. 2008AA01Z403)