Verifiable Internet Elections with Everlasting Privacy and Minimal Trust

This paper presents a new cryptographic Internet voting protocol based on a set membership proof and a proof of knowledge of the representation of a committed value. When casting a vote, the voter provides a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of the representation of one of the registered voter credentials. In this way, votes are anonymized without the need of trusted authorities. The absence of such authorities reduces the trust assumptions to a minimum and makes our protocol remarkably simple. Since computational intractability assumptions are only necessary to prevent the creation of invalid votes during the voting period, but not to protect the secrecy of the vote, the protocol even offers a solution to the everlasting privacy problem.