History of Prêt à Voter

The Prêt à Voter (PaV) verifiable voting system was first created by Peter Ryan (Newcastle Technical Report TR864). The key idea is that the candidate names appear in a random order, which varies from one ballot paper to another. There is a perforated line down the centre of the ballot paper, allowing the list of candidate names to be separated from the ballot. Once the voter has completed the ballot paper, he or she tears the form in half along the perforation, and shreds the list of the candidate names. It is just the remaining part, containing the vote, that is fed into the system. The remaining part also contains encrypted information that can be used to recover the candidate order and interpret the vote, but this can only be done by several election officials working together without revealing the link between individual voters and their votes. Later, its enhanced version was published at ESORICS 2005 by Peter Ryan, Steve Schneider and David Chaum. Moreover, Peter Ryan et al. have found that the scheme can be designed to be more robust using re-encryption mixnets, and a number of papers have been introduced towards this approach. One such paper is published at ESORICS 2006, and another one in Journal of Mathematical Modelling of Voting Systems and Elections: Theory and Applications. A comprehensive summarisation of Prêt à Voter can be found in “Prêt à Voter: a Voter-Verifiable Voting System”, which is published at IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.