Research on the problem of cryptographic elections began in the mid-1980s. Since then, a fair amount of research has aimed to produce ever more sophisticated protocols with more and more desirable properties.
Most of the groundwork for distributed voting protocols came in the 1985 work of Cohen and Fischer [1], in which they first proposed a cryptographically secure election scheme. The Cohen Fischer scheme uses a single election authority and satisfies three important properties:
The CohenFischer scheme has a number of problems, for which solutions have been subsequently proposed. The most obvious flaw is that the election is not truly secret, in the sense that the single election authority can decrypt and determine anyone's vote; the secrecy applies only to other voters. To solve this problem, Benaloh (Cohen) and Yung proposed in [2] to use multiple election authorities, all of which are required to cooperate in order to compute the final tally and decrypt any individual vote. Thus, only a government-wide conspiracy can compromise voter security.
Traditional paper ballot elections have still another advantage over the BenalohYung proposal, that of uncoercibility. In a traditional election, once a voter has voted, there is no process by which the voter can prove how s/he voted. This property may not seem desirable at first, but this prevents the coercion of voters by heavily armed thugs who might otherwise demand proof of how a voter voted. The BenalohYung scheme, like the CohenFischer scheme and many other schemes, has the disadvantage of producing receipts that a voter can use to prove his/her vote. Benaloh and Tuinstra proposed a new protocol in [3] which avoids this problem to a certain extent.