A Verifiable Distributed Voting System Without a Trusted Party

Cryptographic voting systems such as Helios rely heavily on a trusted party to maintain privacy or verifiability. This tradeoff can be done away with by using distributed substitutes for the components that need a trusted party. By replacing the encryption, shuffle, and decryption steps described by Helios with the Pedersen threshold encryption and Neff shuffle, it is possible to obtain a distributed voting system which achieves both privacy and verifiability without trusting any of the contributors. This thesis seeks to examine existing approaches to this problem, and their shortcomings. It provides empirical metrics for comparing different working solutions in detail.