Eperio: Mitigating Technical Complexity in Cryptographic Election Verification

Cryptographic (or end-to-end) election verification is a promising
approach to providing transparent elections in an age of electronic
voting technology. In terms of execution time and software complexity
however, the technical requirements for conducting a cryptographic
election audit can be prohibitive. In an effort to reduce these
requirements we present Eperio: a new, provably secure construction
for providing a tally that can be efficiently verified using only a
small set of primitives. We show how common-place utilities, like the
use of file encryption, can further simplify the verification process
for election auditors. Using Python, verification code can be
expressed in 50 lines of code. Compared to other proposed
proof-verification methods for end-to-end election audits, Eperio
lowers the technical requirements in terms of execution time, data
download times, and code size. As an interesting alternative, we
explain how verification can be implemented using True-Crypt and the
built-in functions of a spreadsheet, making Eperio the first
end-to-end system to not require special-purpose verification
software.