Um protocolo de votação com privacidade incondicional

Abstract

The development of cryptographic electoral protocols gained further traction in the first decades of the twenty-first century, largely due to various advances in science and technology and also motivated by the renewed demands of the various democracies in the context of growing informatization. Central to these protocols is the concept of software independence, which states that an electoral system must produce an evidence trail that allows for integrity checks on the election’s results independently from election-specific electronic machinery, all the while preserving voters’ privacy. In such cryptographic systems, however, it seems inevitable that a compromise needs to be made between unconditional integrity of the results and unconditional privacy of the votes, unconditional integrity being the common choice in many of the most prominent protocols. In this sense, this work proposes an electoral protocol that likewise respects the principle of software independence, but that contrasts to many other proposals in its choice of unconditional privacy of the votes under the belief that voters need to be assured eternal secrecy regarding their electoral choices. Furthermore, the protocol proposed enables end-to-end verifiability (E2E-V) of individual votes via a printed receipt issued to each voter, besides providing universal audit features by means of a simple mathematical equation that must hold for a correctly executed election. This work also presents an implementation of the protocol that allows for illustration of its workings and analysis of some of its core aspects.