Ensuring voters and candidates' confidentiality in E-voting systems

A new method based on cryptography to ensure voters and candidates' confidentiality in the Internet E-Voting, referred to as the Name and vOte separaTed E-voting (NOTE) system, is proposed. In NOTE, an impartial party, the Election Commission (EC) will be responsible for part of the vote counting duties besides collecting and verifying the voter ID. The votes and the candidates' names are separated into two parts during the counting process. EC will hold the candidates' names secret before the tally comes up; the Vote Counting Committee (VCC) only counts the votes and is not involved in unveiling the vote tally by virtue of the anonymity of the candidates. Only EC can disclose the final tally after VCC has counted all votes without knowing who the votes are for during the vote counting procedure. This scheme will effectively ensure voters and candidates' confidentiality, and thus improving election security and fairness.