Towards a Fair and Open Election

A demo of the methods involved in this article is here.

Our election processes are often archaic, where we still put a cross on a piece of paper and then wait for it to be manually counted. Then we must compile all the results from different voting stations and again wait for the result to be compiled. We must then hope that the whole infrastructure is fair and honest in the way that the votes are collected and counted.

But why shouldn’t each citizen have their vote to be completely anonymous and after the votes have been cast, for every citizen to view the result? The instance the votes are finalised, every citizen could then view the result, without waiting for a government to count and process the votes. It might be possible for us to, to “peek” at the votes currently cast, without actually knowing who had currently voted.

Let’s look at an example, where Bob, Alice and Eve want to vote but to keep their votes secret. Once all the votes have been cast, they should then be able to see the result, without actually revealing the voting intents (normally we would have a much larger population, of course, and the larger the population, the greater the anonymity will be):