Sensus: A Security-Conscious Electronic Polling System for the Internet

We present the design and implementation of Sensus, a practical, secure and private system for polling (conducting surveys and elections) over computer networks. Expanding on the work of Fujioka, Okamoto, and Ohta, Sensus uses blind signatures to ensure that only registered voters can vote and that each registered voter only votes once, while at the same time maintaining voters’ privacy. Sensus allows voters to verify independently that their votes were counted correctly, and anonymously challenge the results should their votes be miscounted. We outline seven desirable properties of voting systems and show that Sensus satisfies these properties well, in some cases better than traditional voting systems.