Multidisciplinary Journal Epistemology of the Sciences
Vol. 3, Issue 3, 2026, July–September, Special Edition
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71112/f449y553
ELECTRONIC VOTING APPLICATION USING PAILLIER'S CRYPTOGRAPHIC
ALGORITHM
APLICACIÓN DE VOTACIONES ELECTRÓNICAS UTILIZANDO EL ALGORITMO
CRIPTOGRÁFICO DE PAILLIER
Álvaro Hernán Zavala Ruballo
El Salvador
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Electronic voting application using paillier's cryptographic algorithm
Aplicación de votaciones electrónicas utilizando el algoritmo criptográfico de
paillier
Álvaro Hernán Zavala Ruballo
a,*
alvarohz@usonsonate.edu.sv
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0715-6596
*Corresponding author: alvarohz@usonsonate.edu.sv,
a
Universidad de Sonsonate, El Salvador.
ABSTRACT
Electoral processes in democratic countries are of vital importance, and despite the benefits
offered by technology to make them more efficient and immediate, most people continue to opt
for traditional electoral processes using physical ballots and going in person to the polls to vote
instead of electronic systems via the Internet. The operationalization is based on the use of
secure encryption algorithms and error-free coding implementation, errors that may lead to
vulnerabilities. In this article, an electronic election scheme based on homomorphic encryption
for vote encryption, vote counting and publication of election results is discussed, given the
features of this type of encryption. A web application is developed as an example applying the
Paillier algorithm to simulate an electronic election to validate the calculations, allowing the total
of votes through the multiplication of cyphertexts obtained with Paillier, and thus to ensure
efficiency in the process, integrity and privacy of the data.
Keywords: Electronic election; Homomorphic encryption; Paillier; eVoting; Privacy
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RESUMEN
Los procesos electorales en los países democráticos son de vital importancia y, a pesar de los
beneficios que ofrece la tecnología para hacerlos más eficientes e inmediatos, la mayoría de
las personas sigue optando por los procesos electorales tradicionales mediante el uso de
boletas físicas y asistiendo en persona a las urnas para votar, en lugar de utilizar sistemas
electrónicos a través de Internet. La operacionalización se basa en el uso de algoritmos de
cifrados seguros y en una implementación de código libre de errores, ya que estos pueden dar
lugar a vulnerabilidades. En este artículo se analiza un esquema de elección electrónica
basado en el cifrado homomórfico para el cifrado de votos, el conteo de votos y la publicación
de los resultados electorales, dadas las características de este tipo de cifrado. Se desarrolla
una aplicación web como ejemplo aplicando el algoritmo de Paillier para simular una elección
electrónica con el fin de validar los cálculos, lo que permite obtener el total de los votos a través
de la multiplicación de los textos cifrados obtenidos con Paillier y, de este modo, garantizar la
eficiencia en el proceso, así como la integridad y la privacidad de los datos.
Palabras clave: Elección electrónica; Cifrado homomórfico; Paillier; Voto electrónico;
Privacidad.
Recibido: 16 febrero 2026 | Aceptado: 30 junio 2026 | Publicado: 1 julio 2026
INTRODUCTION
Electronic election is the application of electronic technology to cast and count votes in
an election (Collins English Dictionary, 2024). Typically, the systems that implement it handle
voter registration, vote entry, vote casting, vote encryption, ballot transmission to the server,
vote storage, vote counting, and tabulation of the election result.
In general, two main types of electronic voting can be identified: Electronic voting
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physically supervised by representatives of governmental or independent electoral authorities
(e.g., electronic voting machines located in polling stations, also called e-voting); Remote
electronic voting through the Internet (also called i-voting), where the voter sends his vote
electronically to the electoral authorities, from any location.
This paper develops an electronic election application based on homomorphic encryption
for vote encryption, vote counting and publication of election results by applying the Paillier
algorithm, allowing the addition of votes through the multiplication of the ciphertexts obtained
with Paillier, and thus ensuring efficiency in the process, integrity and privacy of the data.
The application serves as an example to simulate an electronic election in order to
validate the calculations with Paillier homomorphic cryptography.
Literature review
Electronic voting has been the subject of study since around the 2000s, in countries such
as Switzerland (Haines et al., 2020), and many other nations have attempted it. In many cases,
they proceed without giving much thought to whether their electronic voting system is truly
secure or could be compromised to subvert democracy. It is not enough to simply trust the word
of the software provider.
One of the main obstacles to its adoption is the challenge of guaranteeing all the
requirements that traditional voting is based on: authenticity, privacy, integrity, anonymity,
auditability, usability, robustness, scalability, effectiveness, fairness, uniqueness, accessibility,
and accuracy (Peng, 2011).
The reality is that the internet remains insecure and hackable, which is why security
experts have found vulnerabilities in all online voting attempts, including systems in Australia,
Estonia, Switzerland, Russia, and the United States.
In the case of Australia, as mentioned in (Halderman & Teague, 2015), votes are encrypted
using a "digital envelope" consisting of a randomly generated symmetric key, encrypted once
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each with the ElGamal public keys of the election and verification servers. Additionally, the
voting choices are encrypted with AES
1
using the symmetric key. This has implications for both
privacy and system integrity, since both ElGamal and AES require decrypting the content,
exposing both the identity and the vote of each voter.
In Estonia, citizens’ IDs are smart cards that allow cryptographic operations such as
signing and authentication. In (Springall et al., 2014) it is mentioned that (digital) ballots for each
vote are encrypted, separated from the signatures, and copied to an isolated machine before
being decrypted and counted. This tallying server has access to the full association between the
encrypted ballots and the plaintext votes. An attacker who can smuggle this information out
through a covert channel could compromise the secrecy of each voter's ballot and even delete
votes.
In Switzerland (Zetter, 2019), an online voting system was implemented which included
a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) to validate the election, this concept is explained further in the
source. The mistake made by Switzerland would not only allow an attacker to swap all the
ballots but also to do so while the zero-knowledge proof still showed that everything was
functioning correctly and valid.
Russia, another important case analyzed in (Gaudry & Golovnev, 2020), did not publish
technical specifications, but the source code was made available online one day before the first
public test. It turned out that it used ElGamal encryption with keys under 256 bits; the encryption
was applied three times with different keys, and the designers did not know that triple encryption
does not strengthen ElGamal the way it does with DES
2
. The first attack involved a simple key
recovery, as the CADO-NFS
3
library could perform discrete logarithms on a laptop in ten
minutes. Electoral authorities then switched to 1024-bit ElGamal, after which a second attack
1
Advanced Encryption Standard
2
Data Encryption Standard
3
It is a software library for factoring integers and computing discrete logarithms in finite fields.
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was discovered: a one-bit leak from a subgroup attack “sufficient to distinguish between the two
candidates in the election.” Developers denied the attack was effective, but quietly changed the
code anyway.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, a security
analysis was conducted on the Voatz app (Abby Abazorius, 2020), a mobile voting app used in
West Virginia and other states. The app had fundamental security flaws that could allow
someone to view and intercept votes as they are transmitted from mobile phones to the
company’s server. Among other things, researchers found that even though the traffic from the
voter's phone to the server is encrypted, an attacker who can intercept that traffic can still
determine how the user voted and thus block any vote that is not for the attacker’s preferred
candidate.
It is worth noting that the issues found in each implementation are numerous, and for
more detailed information, it is recommended to consult the referenced bibliography.
Theoretical framework
This section discusses the basis for the development of the proposal.
Preliminaries
Electronic Election: Term that was proposed by David Chaum in 1981 (Chaum, 1981)
and means the use of technologies to support the voting process of states or organizations to
make them more efficient.
Many electronic voting schemes have been proposed (Cedillo, 2017), among the main
ones are:
• Blind signatures
• Homomorphic encryption
• Blockchain e-voting
• Mixnet
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The first three, use cryptography to solve voting requirements, while the fourth is based
on the combination of cryptography with a network infrastructure profusely configured for it. It is
worth mentioning that they can be used in combination with Mixnets such as TOR (The Onion
Routing) to ensure the anonymity of vote submission.
Cryptography: Is one of the most important fields of information security. It is a method
of transferring private information and data over an insecure communication network.
Cryptography provides many services such as: confidentiality, authentication, integrity, non-
repudiation and accessibility (Menezes et al., 1997).
The solution of the mathematical problems on which they are built is infeasible as long
as an appropriate key size is selected (Drummond, 2024).
Cryptography also provides security through its cryptographic primitives such as
asymmetric encryption, symmetric encryption, hash functions, key exchange, digital signatures,
etc.
Symmetric cryptography: Algorithms that use the same cryptographic keys for both
encryption and decryption (Kartit et al., 2016).
The keys in question, represent a shared secret and their security depends largely on
the size chosen for them, as well as the safeguard to keep them private between the parties
sharing the secret.
The most widely used algorithm in symmetric cryptography is the AES (Advanced
Encryption Standard) created by NIST(NIST, 2023a).
Asymmetric cryptography: Public-key (asymmetric) algorithms use a pair of keys (a
public key and a private key) and use a different one for each of the two cryptographic
operations (e.g., encryption and decryption, or signature creation and signature verification)
(Shirey, 2007).
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Asymmetric algorithms have key management advantages over equivalent symmetric
ones. First, one key of the pair does not need to be known to anyone other than its owner; so, it
can more easily be kept secret. Second, although the other key is shared by all entities using
the algorithm, it is not necessary to keep that key secret from other entities that do not use it;
therefore, key distribution can be more easily accomplished.
One of the most widely used algorithms in the market is the RSA proposed in (Rivest et
al., 1978) and from which other schemes such as digital signature is also derived.
Hash Function: A hash function is a computationally efficient function mapping binary
strings of arbitrary length to binary strings of some fixed length, called hash-values (Menezes et
al., 1997). Some of the cryptographic uses of hash functions are digital signatures and data
integrity.
The Secure Hash Standard (SHS) describes widely used and secure algorithms such as
SHA-2 (NIST, 2015).
Digital Signature: The digital signature is a cryptographic transformation that provides
security services to verify the authentication of origin, data integrity and non-repudiation of the
signer (NIST, 2023b).
The private key is used by the signer and the public key by anyone to verify the
signature.
Electronic Voting Scheme
The structure of electronic voting systems consists of three phases (OASIS, 2011), pre-
election, election and post-election. The processes in the pre-election phase include candidate
registration, candidate list computation, voter registration (validated with the electoral roll), and
eligible voter list computation. Eligible voters cast their votes during the election phase and each
vote is encrypted for storage. The post-election phase is mainly concerned with the counting of
votes and the announcement of election results.
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Elements of an electronic voting system
According to (Kho et al., 2022) a generic electronic voting scheme involves the following
entities:
• Voter: Individuals who are eligible to vote for candidates.
• Candidate: Nominees seeking to be considered in the election.
• Registrar: Registrars are responsible for authenticating voters.
• Authority: Responsible of conducting the election.
• Auditor: Authorized to verify and review election results.
• Adversary: Malicious individuals attempting to corrupt elections. There are two main
types of adversaries, external and internal (Li et al., 2014). External adversaries
actively force voters to vote in certain ways, while internal adversaries attempt to
breach the system and corrupt voter’s privacy and authority.
Homomorphic Encryption
It has been called "The Swiss Army Knife of cryptography" (Halevi, 2017), it is a form of
encryption that allows calculations to be performed on encrypted data without first having to
decrypt it. An important feature in the process of storing, scrutinizing votes and publishing
results.
A cipher system is said to be homomorphic if it is able to perform a particular algebraic
operation on an original text, equivalent to another algebraic operation (it may not be the same)
on the ciphertext of the original text (Marcolla et al., 2022). Figure 1 shows how it works and
then a theoretical breakdown is made according to (Cedillo, 2017).
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is categorized into Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
and Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) methods. FHE supports both addition and
multiplication operations on encrypted data. In contrast, PHE refers to a system that allows only
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one type of operation, either addition or multiplication. This distinction is discussed in (Ryu et al.,
2023).
Gentry’s scheme was the first algorithm to demonstrate the feasibility of a fully functional
homomorphic encryption system (Gentry, 2009). Proposed by Craig Gentry in 2009, its
publication revolutionized the field of cryptography by proving that it is possible to perform
arbitrary operations on encrypted data without compromising security
Figure 1
Homomorphic Encryption Scheme
A public-key encryption scheme is homomorphic if for all n and all key pairs (pk, sk) it is
possible to define two groups (C, M), such that:
• The plaintext space is M and all ciphertexts obtained from Encpk are elements of C.
• For any m1, m2 M and c1, c2 C with m1 = Decsk(c1) and m2 = Decsk(c2) it is
satisfied that Decsk(c1 c2) = m1 m2, where the group operations are performed
on C and M respectively.
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There are two operations that can be performed on the elements of the set C and M
which are product and addition. The Paillier addition-based algorithm is explained below, and it
is currently one of the most widely used in electronic election protocols.
Paillier Cryptographic System (addition-based)
Proposed by Pascal Paillier in 1999 (Paillier, 1999) it is a probabilistic algorithm that
uses public key cryptography and is based on the problem of decomposition of number into its
prime factors like RSA. Its homomorphic property is defined as follows:
Where: N = modulus and r-value = random number
This means that the product of the ciphertexts is equivalent to the sum of the plain texts.
The above homomorphic property can be used by secure electronic voting systems. For
example, if n voters are allowed to cast a vote m. Each voter encrypts his choice before
submitting his vote. The election authority takes the product of the encrypted votes c and then
decrypts the result and obtains the value t, which is the sum of all votes. The election authority
then knows the result of the votes without using its private key to decrypt each vote. The role of
a random r-value ensures that two equivalent votes will encrypt to the same value with very low
and negligible probability, which will guarantee the voter's privacy and confidentiality.
Practical considerations
According to the paper presented by (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and
Medicine, 2018), e-voting is a cybersecurity problem that requires many factors to consider
before it can be implemented in real-world applications. Cybersecurity is an ongoing challenge
because adversaries constantly implement new techniques to breach system defenses. E-
voting systems connected to the Internet are the most vulnerable to attacks via wireless or
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physical access and during data transmission. All e-voting systems, including polling place
voting and remote i-voting, are vulnerable to the following attacks.
Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. The primary objective of DoS attacks is to slow down
computer systems and to the extent that it affects the casting of ballots, vote counting and the
auditing process.
Malware attacks. Malicious software that can disrupt the vote casting and auditing
process and alter or destroy stored ballots.
Malicious individuals or servers break into the system to retrieve sensitive administrator-
level data, such as voter credentials.
METHODOLOGY
For the software development, the agile project management framework Scrum is used
as a reference and based on some of its artifacts such as Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog and
Sprints (Scrum.org, 2024).
Requirements
1. Pre-election
a) Select encryption keys for the Electoral Authority (to encrypt each vote).
b) Select the number of voters v (voter list).
c) Define the number of candidates k (options)
2. Election
a) Voting: votes are generated randomly,
b) Encrypt each vote with Paillier.
3. Post-election
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a) The electoral authority calculates the results by multiplying the ciphertext of each vote by
taking advantage of the homomorphic property of Paillier and without decrypting each
vote.
b) Decrypt the result of the multiplication to obtain the result
c) Publication of election results in graphs and tables
Development Stage
The application uses the class diagram in Figure 2 for the related cryptographic
calculations.
Figure 2
Class diagram used in web application
Interfaces were designed and developed with Java JSP and considering the established
requirements.
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Testing
Tests were performed for each component. These are based on the execution, review
and feedback of the functions previously established in the requirements. Test cases were
created, and the results were tabulated obtaining successful results for each one.
RESULTS (TECHNICAL PROPOSAL)
The scheme considered in the present work is based on an algorithm whose challenge is
to solve complex mathematical problems or problems of high computational cost, whose
strength has been demonstrated.
The Paillier cryptographic system is one of the most widely used cryptographic schemes.
It has a wide range of applications, such as banking security systems, in the area related to
cloud computing and is widely used in systems for electronic elections (Kho et al., 2022) which
is why it has been considered for analysis in this paper.
Paillier homomorphic property is: the product of the ciphertexts is equivalent to the sum
of the plaintexts, it is an important feature used to count the ballots in an electronic voting
system. When the electoral authority decrypts the result of the products of the ciphertexts, it will
get the final result of the election, but it will not know which voter voted for which candidate,
ensuring privacy (secrecy).
For the research, the Paillier algorithm has been used, a web application has been
developed that acts as an electoral authority and simulates: The generation of the private-public
key pair, generate and encrypt random votes, random candidates and publication of results.
Private-public key pair generation
The electoral authority that organizes the election must use a private-public key pair, the
public key will be used by the voters to encrypt their votes and the private key for the calculation
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of the results to be published, this using its homomorphic property, first obtaining the
multiplication of the ciphertexts (votes).
To create a private-public key pair, we first generate two large primes p, q that satisfy
mcm (pq, (p-1) (q-1) (q-1)) = 1.
Let n = pq and λ = (p-1)(q-1)/gcd(p-1,q-1) . Then generate a number g such that
It is ensured that n divides g by computing the existence of:
Where:
As a result, the public key pk is then (n, g), and the private key sk is (λ, μ).
According to Figure 3 the generatekeys() method performs the following tasks:
Figure 3
Code that generates the values for the keys
Generate random votes and candidates (simulate election)
For the generation of random votes and candidates we will first explain the Paillier
encryption algorithm which is as follows:
Given a message
, generate a random number
. The encrypted message
is:
modLegth = keySize;
p = new BigInteger (modLength / 2, CERTAINTY, new Random ());
q = new BigInteger (modLength / 2, CERTAINTY, new Random ());
lambda = (p. subtract (BigInteger.ONE). multiply (q. subtract (BigInteger.ONE))). Divide (subtract
(BigInteger.ONE). gcd(q.subtract(BigInteger.ONE)));
n = p.multiply(q);
nsquare = n.multiply(n);
g = randomZStarNSquare ();
mu = g.modPow(lambda, nsquare). subtract (BigInteger.ONE). divide(n). modInverse(n);
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For the generation of candidates, it is considered to assign to each candidate a message
m that should be placed on the ballot of the election, this m must be calculated according to the
number of voters (v) and the number of candidates (k) using base 10 powers to facilitate the
computation of the result, using the following code in Figure 4 a different m is obtained for each
candidate.
Figure 4
Code that generates k candidates
Candidatos = k;
List<Candidato> listaCand = new ArrayList();
for (int i =0; i<candidatos;i++) {
String nombre = "C"+i;
BigInteger id = BigInteger.TEN.pow(String.valueOf(v).length()*((i+1)-1));
Candidato c = new Candidato (nombre, id);
listaCand.add(c);
The votes are generated by encrypting a randomly chosen option from the list of
candidates and with a random r value that makes it impossible for two equivalent votes to have
the same ciphertext, code is shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5
Random vote generator routine.
for(int i=0; i<votantes;i++) {
String nombre="V"+i;
BigInteger eleccion=Voto.getRandomCandidato(listaCand);
BigInteger r=paillier.randomZStarN();
BigInteger cifra=paillier.encrypt(eleccion,r);
String hash=Hash.generarHash(String.valueOf(cifra), Hash.SHA256);
Voto v = new Voto (nombre, eleccion, cifra, r, hash);
listaVotos.add(v); }
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Once the voting has been simulated, we move on to the following step.
Publication of election results
To produce the election results it is necessary to know the decryption algorithm, which is
as follows:
Given a ciphertext
, the plaintext message is:
Then given the homomorphic property we must also calculate the multiplication of the
ciphertexts as follows:
The code that generates the sum of the figures and the result of the vote counting is
shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6
Ciphertext multiplier and result decryption routine.
BigInteger sumCifra=BigInteger.ONE;
for (Voto v: listaVotos) {
sumCifra = sumCifra.multiply(v.getCifra());}
sumCifra = sumCifra.mod(paillier.getN(). pow(2));
int longitud = String.valueOf(votantes). length();
conteo = String.format("%0"+candidatos*longitud+"d”, paillier.decrypt(sumCifra));
String [] votosPorCandidato = conteo.split("(? <=\\G. {" + longitud + "})");
out.println("Resultado Conteo (cifras multiplicadas): "+ conteo);
Zero Knowledge Proof
These proofs are part of the audit that an election must undergo in order to ensure its
transparency and validity.
Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) allows an individual to convince another individual that he
has certain information without revealing anything about the content of the information. In
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electronic voting schemes there are two secrets to protect primarily, one is the vote, and the
other is the secret encryption key (Garimella & Conway, 2024).
At least 2 tests should be performed: one to verify that the encrypted vote is valid, and
another for the electoral authority to prove that the final decryption was performed correctly. The
description of the tests can be found in (Cedillo, 2017).
In the first one, when voters send their votes to be counted, the electoral authority must
be able to prove that the cipher of their vote is one of {1, N, N2,..., Nm-1}. To do this, a ZKP is
performed between a voter and the election authority.
In the second one, it is desired to know if the final result T (plaintext of the voting result)
obtained from
is correct. In this case, the objective is to prove to any entity that the result has
been correctly decrypted, but without revealing the private key that was used.
Graph and tabulated example of election results.
Below is an example of the resulting simulation with the application developed in Java
with JSP.
The graph is shown in Figure 7, while Table 1 shows the votes in detail.
Input data used: keySize = 2048, v =100, k = 4
Figure 7
Graph showing the simulation result.
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Table 1
Published election result (figures shortened for presentation purposes to 10/100 voters and
10/600 digits approx.).
Vote
R
Candidate
Ciphertext
Tracking code
V0
1898263655
1
1502743253
78be8b1484
V1
1654883641
1000000
1378275499
83e7115dcd
V2
2173069031
1000000
1256832105
77dca46bb0
V3
8643859050
1
1551794613
583c203c76
V4
1809870043
1000
1890018695
d927e56aa6
V5
1577341515
1000
2261629092
4c081de864
V6
9305778105
1
1443214753
9154aa5f9b
V7
9706827489
1000000000
1658896460
aa27ea4f11
V8
6873537249
100
3174567650
0ec2545611
V9
1322381662
100
8692403207
5eab40716f
This example is established for demonstrative purposes because the election should not
be revealed in clear, nor the variable r, since this compromises the security, privacy and secrecy
of the voters, in addition a tracking code is created to perform audit tests between the voter and
the electoral authority.
DISCUSSION
The results obtained in the simulation confirm the feasibility of using Paillier’s
homomorphic encryption in an electronic voting scheme, particularly due to its capacity to
preserve vote privacy while enabling tallying without decrypting individual ballots. This approach
addresses one of the main challenges of online voting systems: ensuring both the integrity of
the election outcome and the anonymity of voters.
The use of the additive homomorphic property demonstrates that it is possible to sum
votes through the multiplication of ciphertexts, minimizing the handling of plaintext data and
consequently reducing the risk of sensitive information exposure. This result is consistent with
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(Cedillo, 2017), who emphasized that homomorphic encryption allows transparency in the
process without compromising individual confidentiality.
Compared with other cryptographic schemes used in international experiences, such as
ElGamal or AES in the Australian case (Halderman & Teague, 2015), the Paillier algorithm
offers advantages by avoiding the need to decrypt votes for processing, thus mitigating risks of
linking identities to ballots. Furthermore, the practical demonstration through a web-based
application supports the theoretical assertions by (Halevi, 2017) regarding the potential of
homomorphic encryption as a versatile and secure tool for high-sensitivity systems, including
electronic elections.
Nevertheless, there are still significant limitations for real world adoption. A secure
electronic voting implementation depends not only on the cryptographic algorithm but also on
the underlying technological infrastructure, key management, and auditing mechanisms. As
observed in the cases of Estonia, Switzerland, and Russia (Gaudry & Golovnev, 2020; Springall
et al., 2014; Zetter, 2019), even systems based on robust algorithms can be vulnerable due to
design flaws, verification gaps, or misconfigurations.
Additionally, the inclusion of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) is presented as an essential
component to ensure transparency and verifiability, both during vote casting and tallying. These
proofs, already implemented in Swiss systems and discussed by (Haines et al., 2020), make it
possible to guarantee that the process functions correctly without revealing sensitive
information.
From a practical standpoint, the simulation demonstrated that homomorphic vote
counting can be efficiently performed even with 2048-bit keys, indicating its feasibility for small
and medium-scale electoral processes. However, scalability and resilience against denial-of-
service attacks or malicious software manipulation remain relevant challenges (National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71112/f449y553
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In summary, this study shows that combining Paillier’s homomorphic encryption with
cryptographic auditing mechanisms, such as Zero-Knowledge Proofs, provides a solid
foundation for trustworthy electronic voting systems. Nevertheless, the overall security of such
systems will depend on the correct implementation of software, network infrastructure,
independent auditing, and voter awareness of cybersecurity principles. Future research could
extend this proposal by integrating post-quantum cryptography and blockchain-based
architectures to enhance resistance against emerging technological threats.
CONCLUSIONS
The Paillier algorithm correctly implemented in electronic voting is infeasible because it
has passed the test of time, so cryptographic vulnerabilities must be discarded.
The efficiency of the vote counting process and publication of election results are
increased in terms of efficiency compared to manual counting mechanisms at the ballot box.
The integrity and privacy of the counted votes is ensured under the correct application
of.
Paillier's cryptographic system for vote storage.
The audit of the elections as part of the transparency and validity can be ensured by the
properties of the cryptographic system, both between the voter and the electoral authority, as
well as the result published through a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP).
E-voting is a cybersecurity problem that requires many factors to be considered before it
can be implemented in real-world applications. Cybersecurity is an ongoing challenge because
adversaries are constantly implementing new techniques to breach system defenses.
The current work could evolve into a Software Development Kit (SDK) for straightforward
implementation of e-voting systems, from creation to verification and publication of election
results.
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Recommendations
In the development of electronic voting applications, security must be implemented as a
transversal axis to secure networks, systems and IT infrastructure, which are the edges from
which vulnerabilities can be induced.
Apply fingerprinting to be able to audit the integrity of certain files such as: the electoral
roll, the source code of the voting application and/or the ballot.
Perform ZKPs, one to verify that the encrypted vote is valid, and another for the electoral
authority to demonstrate that the final decryption was performed correctly. The description of the
proofs can be found in (Cedillo, 2017).
Use in combination with mixnet such as TOR to guarantee anonymity and make it
impossible to trace the origin (user) and destination (server) of the vote.
Quantum computing can break any current cryptographic scheme, including Blockchain
(Mamatha et al., 2024), but also not ready yet, so work is already underway on post-quantum e-
voting schemes. Post-quantum cryptography in e-voting schemes is a new research direction
and few have implemented it in e-voting.
Declaración de conflicto de interés
El autor declara no tener ningún conflicto de interés relacionado con esta investigación.
Declaración de contribución a la autoría
Álvaro Hernán Zavala Ruballo: conceptualización, curación de datos, análisis formal,
adquisición de fondos, investigación, metodología, administración del proyecto, recursos,
software, supervisión, validación, visualización, redacción del borrador original, revisión y
edición de la redacción
Declaración de uso de inteligencia artificial
El autor no utilizó inteligencia artificial en ninguna parte del manuscrito.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71112/f449y553
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