On Error Exponents Under A Privacy-Preserving Voting Regime
Ertem Tuncel · 2019
Standard method of types and large deviations techniques are utilized to analyze the accuracy of an electronic voting mechanism, where to protect the privacy of the voters, votes are randomly changed by the system before being transmitted. Special attention is given to referendum elections with only YES and NO votes are on the ballot, and a scheme where votes are flipped with a fixed probability. It is shown that the exponent of the probability of incorrectly calling the election can be well-approximated to be proportional to the square of how far the vote is from 50%-50%. This result is then leveraged to understand the interplay between number of voters, the allowed probability of incorrectly calling the election, and the level of privacy.