User:PulpSpy/Draft of E2E

Electronic Ballots
The earliest E2E (then simply called cryptographic voting) system is due to David Chaum in 1981. The system involves voters anonymously registering a public key as a pseudonym for their identity and then digitally submitting their votes, signed with the corresponding private key, through an anonymous channel to a public bulletin board, where the results are published. In both cases, the anonymous channel was instantiated with a mix network.

In 2004, David Chaum proposed a solution that allows a voter to verify that the vote is cast appropriately and that the vote is accurately counted using visual cryptography. After the voter selects their candidates, a DRE machine prints out a specially formatted version of the ballot on two transparencies. When the layers are stacked, they show the human-readable vote. However, each transparency is encrypted with a form of visual cryptography so that it alone does not reveal any information unless it is decrypted. The voter selects one layer to destroy at the poll. The DRE retains an electronic copy of the other layer and gives the physical copy as a receipt to ensure the ballot is not later changed. The system guards against changes to the voter's ballot and uses a mix-net decryption procedure to ensure that each vote is accurately counted. Sastry, Karloff and Wagner pointed out that there are issues with both of the Chaum and VoteHere cryptographic solutions.

Paper Ballots
Chaum has since developed Punchscan, which has stronger security properties and uses simpler paper ballots. The paper ballots are voted on and then a privacy-preserving portion of the ballot is scanned by an optical scanner.

The Prêt à Voter system, invented by Peter Ryan, uses a shuffled candidate order and a traditional mix network. As in Punchscan, the votes are made on paper ballots and a portion of the ballot is scanned.

The Scratch and Vote system, invented by Ben Adida, uses a scratch-off surface to hide cryptographic information that can be used to verify the correct printing of the ballot.

The ThreeBallot voting protocol, invented by Ron Rivest, was designed to provide some of the benefits of a cryptographic voting system without using cryptography. It can in principle be implemented on paper although the presented version requires an electronic verifier.

The Scantegrity and Scantegrity II systems provide E2E properties, however instead of being a replacement of the entire voting system, as is the case in all the proceeding examples, it works as an add-on for existing optical scan voting systems. Scantegrity II employs invisible ink and was developed by a team that included Chaum, Rivest, and Ryan.

Related Concepts
In E2E systems, the final tally is typically produced by an election authority or set of election trustees. Closely related to E2E systems are boardroom voting systems, where cryptography is also employed to keep voter selections secret however in these schemes, the voters themselves produce the tally through a secure multi-party computation.