Anonymous voting by two-round public discussion

Abstract

In 2006, Hao and Zieliński proposed a two-round anonymous veto protocol (called AV-net), which provided exceptional efficiency compared to related techniques. In this study, the authors add a self-tallying function to the AV-net, making it a general-purpose voting protocol. The new protocol works in the same setting as the AV-net – it requires no trusted third parties or private channels, and participants execute the protocol by sending two-round public messages. Compared with related voting protocols in past work, this is significantly more efficient in terms of the number of rounds, computational cost and bandwidth usage.