A Multi-Candidate Electronic Voting Scheme Based on Secure Sum Protocol

Multi-candidate electronic voting is very useful in numerous practical situations. Most of the previous schemes discuss Boolean vote in which voters can only cast “yes/no” vote. A novel multi-candidates election scheme is presented which is appropriate for k-out-of-m election. The main idea is to express a ballot by a multi-precision number that allows voting for up to k out of the m candidates in one ballot. The purpose of the vote is to elect more than one winner among m candidates. The self-tallying protocol in the solution is based on the multi-precision arithmetic and the secure sum protocol without any trusted third party. In comparison with general methods, the results of this paper don't rely on any traditional cryptography or computation intractability assumption that is information-theoretically secure. This scheme achieves security including perfect ballot secrecy, receipt-free and dispute-freeness tally that extend the previous general security. Each participant takes only O(nm(log_2 n)) bit operations, which is more efficient than previous schemes. The scheme is very practical and can be efficiently implemented.