An information-theoretic model of voting systems

  • Authors:
  • Ben Hosp;Poorvi L. Vora

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington DC 20052, United States;Department of Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington DC 20052, United States

  • Venue:
  • Mathematical and Computer Modelling: An International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This paper presents an information-theoretic model of a vote counting system, and well-defined criteria for evaluating such a system with respect to integrity, privacy and verifiability. The impossibility of achieving perfect integrity, perfect verifiability and perfect privacy follows easily from the information-theoretic approach. The model is applied to the measurement of privacy loss in the ThreeBallot and Farnel voting systems, and finds both systems to have similar privacy loss.