A secure and available electronic voting service for a large-scale distributed system

We present a secure and available electronic voting service suitable for a large-scale distributed system such as the Internet. The proposed service is based on replication and tolerates both benign and fully arbitrary failures. If enough servers are correct, service availability and security are ensured despite the presence of faulty servers and malicious voters. A voter that is affected by a crash failure can vote after recovery. The proposed service satisfies common voting requirements including voter eligibility and privacy, and tally accuracy. In addition, the service satisfies a further important requirement, namely tally verifiability without any intervention of voters. Anyone, including an external observer, can easily be convinced that the voting outcome 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, and simplifies the interaction of voters with the electronic voting system. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.