An Overview of End-to-End Verifiable Voting Systems
This work aims to restore trust in elections and democratic processes by addressing technical, legal, and usability challenges in deploying E2E voting systems.
The paper provides a comprehensive introduction to end-to-end verifiable voting systems, tracing their evolution and describing current state-of-the-art operations to make the innovations accessible to a wider audience.
Advances in E2E verifiable voting have the potential to fundamentally restore trust in elections and democratic processes in society. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive introduction to the field. We trace the evolution of privacy and verifiability properties in the research literature and describe the operations of current state-of-the-art E2E voting systems. We also discuss outstanding challenges to the deployment of E2E voting systems, including technical, legal, and usability constraints. Our intention, in writing this chapter, has been to make the innovations in this domain accessible to a wider audience. We have therefore eschewed description of complex cryptographic mechanisms and instead attempt to communicate the fundamental intuition behind the design of E2E voting systems. We hope our work serves as a useful resource and assists in the future development of E2E voting.