Cobra: toward concurrent ballot authorization for internet voting
Aleksander Essex, Jeremy Edmund Clark, Urs Hengartner · 2012
We propose and study the notion of concurrent ballot authorization for coercion-resistant, end-to-end verifiable (E2E) internet voting. A central part of providing coercion resistance is the ability for an election authority to filter out fake ballots from legitimate ones in a way that is both private and universally verifiable. This ballot authorization process, however, can potentially come at a heavy computational cost. In previous proposals, the bulk of this computation cannot be performed until the last ballot has been cast. By contrast, concurrent ballot authorization allows ballots to be authorized as they are submitted, allowing the tally to be declared immediately after polls close. An efficient tally is especially important in the coercion-resistant internet voting setting, as