End-to-end verifiable voting: cryptographic evidence without revealing votes

End-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting is an approach in which cryptography lets each voter check that their ballot was correctly recorded and included, and lets anyone check that the published records were tallied correctly, all without revealing how any individual voted. U.S. voting standards recognize it as one of two ways to achieve software independence, but as of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s December 2025 announcement, no protocol had been approved through its new evaluation process.

Definition

The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 (VVSG 2.0) define cryptographic E2E verifiable voting systems as systems that use “cryptographic techniques to store an encrypted copy of the voter’s ballot selections while maintaining ballot secrecy,” allowing “election outcomes to be independently and universally verified by members of the public”.⁠¹ Voters receive “a special receipt of their cast ballot,” one that “allows them to verify their vote was included in the outcome but does not reveal to anyone how they voted”.⁠¹

The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) lists three properties a protocol must support:⁠²

• Cast as intended: voters can confirm the system “correctly interpreted their ballot selections while in the polling place.”
• Recorded as cast: voters can “verify that their cast ballots were accurately recorded.”
• Tallied as recorded: a “publicly verifiable tabulation process from the public records of encoded ballots.”

Origin and history

E2E verifiability comes from academic cryptography research aimed at making elections checkable without trusting the software that runs them. The problem it answers is the same one behind paper audits: Lindeman and Stark note that “computer software cannot be guaranteed to be perfect or secure”.⁠³ VVSG 2.0, adopted February 10, 2021, requires every conforming voting system to be software independent and names two methods: “independent voter-verifiable paper records” and “cryptographic E2E verifiable voting systems”.⁠¹ The EAC’s page on its E2E protocol evaluation process states that software-independent systems must “produce voter-verifiable paper records or implement an approved cryptographic end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting protocol,” and describes a call for proposals, with NIST, reviewed in rounds of about a year each.⁠²

Research has also addressed coercion in E2E designs. Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson’s model of coercion-resistant elections considers an adversary who may demand that voters “vote in a particular manner, abstain from voting, or even disclose their secret keys”.⁠⁴

How E2E verifiability is used and evaluated

An E2E system typically works in stages. The voter’s choices are encrypted, and the encrypted ballot is posted to a public record. The voter keeps a receipt that identifies their encrypted ballot without revealing its content. Anyone can then run software to confirm that the posted encrypted ballots were combined into the published tally correctly. The cast-as-intended check is the hardest part to make usable, because it asks the voter to confirm that the encryption matches their choice.

The EAC’s evaluation criteria include suitability under VVSG 2.0, “ease of use,” cryptographic maturity, practicality and cost, and intellectual property.⁠² These criteria reflect a known concern: a verification that few voters perform, or perform incorrectly, provides less protection than its mathematics suggests.

Common confusions and neighboring terms

• E2E vs. “end-to-end encryption.” Encrypted messaging protects content in transit. E2E verifiable voting is about public evidence that votes were counted correctly.
• E2E vs. voter-verified paper record. Both provide software independence under VVSG 2.0. Paper relies on physical records and audits; E2E relies on cryptographic proofs.
• E2E vs. internet voting. E2E verifiability is a property of a protocol and can be used in polling places. It does not by itself solve the problems of voting from home, such as coercion.
• Receipt vs. proof of vote. An E2E receipt shows inclusion, not content, to protect secrecy.

How My Vote Forward uses the term

My Vote Forward discusses E2E verifiability in Audits and verification as one recognized route to public evidence, alongside paper records and risk-limiting audits. The framework states that any future real voting would need an approved protocol and independent evaluation; neither exists for this project, and no approval is claimed. The demo does not implement E2E verifiable voting.

Unresolved questions

• Will enough voters perform the cast-as-intended check for it to deter tampering?
• Can E2E receipts be made usable for voters with disabilities without weakening coercion resistance?
• How should a jurisdiction explain a cryptographic proof to a public that cannot inspect the mathematics?