Boardroom Voting: Verifiable Voting with Ballot Privacy Using Low-Tech Cryptography in a Single Room
This addresses the need for secure, verifiable voting in settings where constituents distrust computer technology, though it is a proof-of-concept with incremental improvements over existing low-tech methods.
The paper tackles the problem of conducting verifiable boardroom elections with ballot privacy using only low-tech cryptography, proposing a protocol with novel building blocks like foldable ballots and visual secrets that ensure no one can determine how others voted while allowing voters to verify their ballots were correctly processed.
A boardroom election is an election that takes place in a single room -- the boardroom -- in which all voters can see and hear each other. We present an initial exploration of boardroom elections with ballot privacy and voter verifiability that use only "low-tech cryptography" without using computers to mark or collect ballots. Specifically, we define the problem, introduce several building blocks, and propose a new protocol that combines these blocks in novel ways. Our new building blocks include "foldable ballots" that can be rotated to hide the alignment of ballot choices with voting marks, and "visual secrets" that are easy to remember and use but hard to describe. Although closely seated participants in a boardroom election have limited privacy, the protocol ensures that no one can determine how others voted. Moreover, each voter can verify that their ballot was correctly cast, collected, and counted, without being able to prove how they voted, providing assurance against undue influence. Low-tech cryptography is useful in situations where constituents do not trust computer technology, and it avoids the complex auditing requirements of end-to-end cryptographic voting systems such as Prêt-à-Voter. This paper's building blocks and protocol are meant to be a proof of concept that might be tested for usability and improved.