A framework and taxonomy for comparison of electronic voting schemes

Electronic voting is an emerging social application of cryptographic protocols. A vast amount of literature on electronic voting has been developed over the last two decades. In this paper, we provide a framework that classifies these approaches and defines a set of metrics under which their properties can be compared. Such a methodology reveals important differences in security properties between the classes and allows for selection and future design of voting schemes, based on application requirements. We illustrate the use of our framework by analyzing some of the existing electronic voting schemes.