Abstract Free and fair elections are indispensable to quantify the sentiments of the populace for forming the government of representatives in democratic countries. Due to its procedural variation from country to country and complexity, to maneuverer, it is a challenging task. Since the Orthodox paper-based electoral systems are slow and error-prone, therefore, a secure and efficient electoral system always remained a key area of research. Although a lot of literature is available on this topic. However, due to reported anomalies and weaknesses in American and France election in 2016, it once again has become a pivotal subject of research. In this article, we proposed a new secure and efficient electronic voting scheme based on public key cryptosystem dubbed as Number Theory Research Unit (NTRU). Furthermore, an efficient and robust three factors authentication protocol based on a personalized memorable password, a smartcard, and bioHash is proposed to validate the legitimacy of a voter for casting a legal vote. NTRU based blind signatures are used to preserve the anonymity and privacy of vote and voters, whereas the proficiency of secure and efficient counting of votes is achieved through NTRU based homomorphic tally. Non-coercibility and individual verifiability are attained through Mark Pledge scheme. The proposed applied electronic voting scheme is, secure, transparent and efficient for large scale elections.

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[30] Zhang P., Yu J., and Liu H., “Homomorphic Signature Scheme and its Application in The Electronic Voting,” Journal of Shenzhen University Science and Engineering, vol. 28, pp. 489-494 2011. Safdar Shaheen received his MS degree in Information Security from Sichuan University, China. He is currently working towards the PhD degree from Riphah Institute of Systems Engineering, Riphah International University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has published and presented five papers at various national/international conferences. His research interests include authentication, privacy, cryptology, multicast security, blockchain and secure electronic voting machine. Muhammad Yousaf is working as Associate Professor in Faculty of Computing, Riphah International University (RIU), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is also serving as Academic Advisor in Riphah Institute of Systems Engineering (RISE), Islamabad. He completed his PhD in Computer Engineering in 2013 from Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering (CASE), Islamabad. His research interests include network security, network forensics, traffic analysis, mobility management, and bandwidth aggregation. Mudassar Jalil earned his PhD degree from COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad, Pakistan. During PhD research, he visited Heidelberg Graduate School of Mathematical and Computational Methods for the Sciences, University of Heidelberg, Germany as an ERASMUS exchange student. He has 14 international publications in well recognized journals. His research area is Fluid Mechanics and Cryptography.