How To Prove An Election

Well. In the UK we are going through a strange political drama just now, and the current government is asking for another general election on 12 December 2019. So it will be out with the printed cards, the paper registers, the pencil, the votes in a van, and the human counting, again. In previous elections there have been many cases of where there was a recount, and each time the count came out differently. So how can we create a simple signature that would account for every vote cast, and where everyone could check the results?

What we need is to issue every voter with a unique ID (associated with a private key). From this private key, the voter will be able to generate a public key, and which will be used to verify their vote. Once they cast their vote, each voter will take a hash of the vote, and then encrypt this with their private key, and each voter will then create a signature for their vote. Trent can then take a copy of the signature and check it against the vote. The checking is done with the public key of the voter. Trent can then gather all the signatures and public keys, and create a merged public key and a merged signature, and which can then be verified for their trustworthiness, and that all the votes have been taken into account. Let’s say there’s Bob, Alice and Carol voting, we then get: