Author(s): Aman Chaudhary
Mentor(s): Sreekanth Malladi
Institution SUU
The success of any democracy depends on fair voting. When setting up voter lists for voting in any democracy, the voter registration information is usually made public to ensure that it is auditable by anyone including contesting parties. However, this leads to the profiling of voters which can be used to target and influence the decisions of voters besides other problems such as coercion to abstain from voting, basically damaging the integrity of the voting system. Agrawal in CSF 2024 presented a paper showcasing a method to generate electoral rolls that are publicly auditable yet privacy preserving. Their method allows for verification that the electoral roll has not been tampered with, while not revealing any personally identifiable information of the voters. The approach is such that if the electoral rolls have been tampered with (e.g. vote stuffing), then, the audit will fail with a good probability. The approach mentioned in their paper runs in reasonable time given a fairly large population. They have included a practical implementation of their method and claimed that it generates an electoral roll for a million voters in a day with the registration and casting happening instantaneously. In this paper, we test the approach in Agrawal et al.’s paper and show that it is possible to implement it in the USA, since elections are held state-wide instead of nationwide. We have tested their implementation for the population of Utah (3.5 million) for which the most time consuming module takes approximately 5.25 hours on a 10 core CPU. Since the maximum population among the states in the USA is approximately 39.1 million, it is possible to run the whole implementation in a few hours given that CPUs of better processing power could be used. Hence, we conclude that the approach mentioned in Agrawal et al.’s paper is feasible to implement elections in the USA such that voter information is kept private at the same time electoral rolls are auditable to ensure that the elections are held fair.