Electronic voting with fully distributed trust and maximized flexibility regarding ballot design

One common way to ensure the security in voting schemes is to distribute critical tasks between different entities — so called trustees. While in most election settings election authorities perform the task of trustees, elections in small groups such as board elections can be implemented in a way that all voters are also trustees. This is actually the ideal case for an election as trust is maximally distributed. A number of voting schemes have been proposed for facilitating such elections. Our focus is on a mix net based approach to maximize flexibility regarding ballot design. We proposed and implemented a corresponding voting scheme as an Android smartphone application. We believe smartphones are most likely to be used in the election settings that we consider in the paper. Our implementation also enables voters to remotely participate in the voting process. The implementation enables us to measure timings for the tallying phase for different settings in order to analyze whether the chosen mix net based scheme is suitable for the considered election settings.