Paper 2025/1482 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1482 ↗

Complex Elections via Threshold (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption

Charlotte Bonte
Georgio Nicolas
Nigel P. Smart
Abstract

We discuss how Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), and in particular the TFHE scheme, can be used to define an e-voting scheme for the Alternative Vote (AV) election system. This system has a more complex tallying phase than traditional First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) election variants. Previous work on e-voting schemes that used homomorphic encryption has focused on FPTP systems only, and utilized mainly linearly homomorphic encryption. We show, by using FHE, that more complex electoral systems such as AV can also be supported by homomorphic encryption. We show security of our protocol by considering it as a simple MPC functionality, and we also show practicality by presenting some experimental runtimes using the tfhe-rs library.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2026-05-05: last updated
2025-08-15: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2025/1482
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1482,
      author = {Charlotte Bonte and Georgio Nicolas and Nigel P. Smart},
      title = {Complex Elections via Threshold (Fully) Homomorphic Encryption},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1482},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1482}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, this archive does not use cookies or embedded third party content.