Verifiable_Democracy 2050 V3
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: India's elections still depend on physical booths, paper rolls and travel to a home constituency. Asa result, migrant workers, Indians working abroad, elderly citizens without birth records andresidents of remote hamlets are often left out. This paper argues that the remedy is not merelydigital voting but verifiable democracy: every step, from enrolment to recall, should leave evidencethat any citizen can check. Building on the author's Digital Sovereignty & Accountability Protocol(DSAP, 2026) and Public Representatives Accountability Charter, the paper proposes eight reformcomponents organised on two pillars.Pillar 1 (policy need) sets out the reforms: a voter roll maintained from Aadhaar and otherofficial updates, with field checks only where records disagree; a chain-of-trust citizenshipattestation that spares elderly voters a search for documents; conduct-based party accountability;verifiable candidate affidavits; a dual vote, in which each voter elects a local representative andalso ranks a leader from the same party's declared slate of up to three nominees, which fixes bothleadership and succession; anonymous yet verifiable recall; and by-election costs assigned bycause. Pillar 2 (technical feasibility) translates each reform into the minimum security propertyit needs. Six components need only integrity and can begin under current law; voting and recallalso need ballot secrecy and coercion resistance and must be phased in after audited pilots.Feasibility is demonstrated with a working Cryptographic Voting Machine (CVM) prototype inPython. It checks eligibility, enforces one vote per voter, enforces the dual-vote rule, keeps ballotsfree of identity, issues voter-checkable receipts and seals the stored record so that any edit ordeletion locks voting. It passed all 16 functional and security tests on an ordinary Android phone,using synthetic data only. Conventional polling continues in parallel until digital voting is fullyaccepted.The contribution to cryptology is the translation of electoral rules into explicit, testable securityrequirements, each paired with an established technique and a legal path, and demonstrated incode. Limitations, including end-to-end verifiability, coercion resistance, trust in key holders,connectivity and peak server load, are stated openly.Keywords: verifiable democracy; electoral reform; dual vote; cryptographic voting machine;remote voting; voter roll integrity; coercion resistance; anonymous credentials, India
Author: Ayyer, S Ravichandran
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225614148
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