Faster print on demand for Prêt à Voter
Chris Culnane, James Heather, Rui Joaquim, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Steve A. Schneider, Vanessa Teague · Open Repository and Bibliography (University of Luxembourg) · 2014
Printing Prêt a ̀ Voter ballots on demand is desirable both for conve-nience and security. It allows a polling station to serve numerous different ballots, and it avoids many problems associated with the custody of the printouts. This paper describes a new proposal for printing Prêt a ̀ Voter ballots on demand. The emphasis is on computational efficiency suitable for real elections, and on very general ballot types. 1 Intro There are several projects on end-to-end verifiable election protocols either already used, or intended to be used in government elections, including the Scantegrity II project in Takoma Park [CCC+10], and the StarVote project in Texas [BBK+11]. Various other e2e systems such as VoteBox [SDW08], Wom-bat [RTsRBN] and Helios [Adi08] have been used for non-government elections. Many other proposals exist in the academic literature. Our motivation is adapting Prêt a ̀ Voter for elections in the Australian state of Victoria for the 2014 state election. This requires STV1 ballots with approx-imately 30 candidates, and various other ballot types. Although the proposed algorithm is specific to the Victorian project, it would work just as well for other versions of Prêt a ̀ Voter, including those that are filled in manually. This paper introduces a new protocol for the verifiable printing on demand of Prêt a ̀ Voter ballot forms. A similar approach would work for any scheme in which voters select or arrange ciphers from a pre-generated ballot form. Scant-egrity is the obvious other application. The crucial requirement is that voters (and others) can audit some ballot forms for correctness without compromising