An Anonymous and Accountable Aggregate Ring Signature Algorithm for Electronic Voting

Electronic voting is an important approach for the digitalization of elections and voting procedures, in which cryptographic techniques are used to provide anonymity, verifiability, and tamper resistance. To address the low tally-verification efficiency and insufficient support for diverse voting modes identified in existing schemes, an anonymous and auditable aggregate ring signature scheme supporting multiple voting modes was proposed. The proposed construction was designed to preserve voter privacy while ensuring the legitimacy of voting operations. Ring signatures were employed to hide verifier identities and reduce the risk of tracing or manipulation during verification, while an aggregation mechanism was introduced to compress multiple ballots into compact verification objects to improve tally-verification efficiency. To regulate the number of votes cast by the same signer, a linking authority was introduced together with linkable tags, enabling support for both single-vote and multiple-vote settings. Security analysis and experimental results were conducted to validate the proposed scheme. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a good balance between anonymous regulation and efficiency, and reduces the time overhead in the linking phase by about 98.29% on average compared with the k-LRS scheme.