An information-theoretic model of voting systems

This paper presents an information-theoretic model of a vote counting system, and well-defined criteria for evaluating such a system with respect to integrity, privacy and verifiability. The impossibility of achieving perfect integrity, perfect verifiability and perfect privacy follows easily from the information-theoretic approach. The model is applied to the measurement of privacy loss in the ThreeBallot and Farnel voting systems, and finds both systems to have similar privacy loss.