The Electronic Voting in the Presence of Rational Voters

The most distinct character of electronic voting is that voters need not to vote at a certain ballot box. With the development of Internet, electronic voting is becoming an important field in electronic commerce. The basic security requirements for electronic voting are anonymity of the voters, privacy and fairness of the votes. In fact, electronic voting can be regarded as a multi-party computation, where distributed parties wish to securely compute the votes in electronic voting systems. In this paper, we redefined the types of parties in electronic voting by using definitions in rational multi-party computation. More specifically, voters are regarded as rational other than honest or malicious, where voting is considered as a social choice. Rational voters care about their utilities when they decide to vote. We first present a rational secret sharing scheme (RSSS) and then construct an electronic voting protocol based on this RSSS.