Graduate Defense: Yoonsu Ra

Thesis Information

Title: Toward Privacy-Preserving Electronic Voting With Ballot-Spoiling Using Blockchain

Program: Master of Computer Science

Advisor: Dr. Gaby Dagher, Computer Science

Committee Members: Dr. Amit Jain, Computer Science; and Dr. Nasir Eisty, Civil Engineering

Abstract

Several voting techniques have been presented in recent years to address the security and privacy concerns associated with electronic voting. Some of these systems have
used blockchain technology to reduce the requirement for centralized authority trust while maintaining voter privacy and ballot confidentiality. Existing methods, however, neglect to comply with government standards and therefore are unsuitable for real-world election settings. They often overlook essential attributes such as ballot spoiling and voter-to-ballot unlinkability, dismissing them as conflicting features. In this thesis, we introduce ORBIT, a cryptographic voting scheme that complies with regulations outlined in the Idaho state law while achieving receipt-freeness (security) and ballot-hiding (privacy).