Reported-Corrupted Sum

Enabling voters to credibly report corrupted submissions after an election, with built-in defense against false claims.

TL;DR

After votes are unlocked, a voter who sees their intended vote is missing needs to be able to credibly say: “my vote is missing”.
Reported-corrupted ballots can be re-tallied separately as a Reported-Corrupted Sum — subtracted from the Initial Tally to produce a cleaned Total.
False claims are self-penalizing: lying moves the voter’s real vote into the corrupted bucket, weakening their own side.

The Gap After Detection

SIV gives voters several ways to discover a tampered vote: a missing Verification #, a mismatch during a 2nd-Device Check, or a failed Strengthened Verification check. These checks can be initiated autonomously by a voter, or as part of a more comprehensive Risk Limiting Audit.

But detection is only half the story. Once detected, we still need to do something about it.

If the voting period is still open, a compromised vote can be directly remediated. But after close, when new votes are no longer accepted, we can still allow honest voters to report issues, without creating an incentive for false claims.

The Reported-Corrupted Sum

The key idea: publish a separate tally of ballots voters have credibly flagged as corrupted, and subtract it from the initial full tally.

                Initial Tally
    −  Reported-Corrupted Sum
   ---------------------------
            Uncorrupted Total

Each reported corruption is a “-1” against whatever selection it contains — as if that vote should never have counted.

Scope: Client-side failures we can’t adjudicate

This mechanism exists for a specific failure mode: something went wrong between voter intent and the encrypted ballot that reached the server, and we can’t cleanly assign blame.

Possible causes:

	Voter	Client Software
Malice	⚠️ Deliberately false report	Cheating malware
Accident	Misremembered or mistaken selection	Bug

We may not know which quadrant is the truth. But this Reported-Corrupted Sum technique lets us move forward anyway: honest reports are accommodated, and false reports are self-penalizing.

Failures in other parts of the voting process have clearer attribution, and can be handled more cleanly.

How Reporting Works

A voter who believes their vote was corrupted reports it. The system looks up their originally submitted encrypted ballot — the one authenticated to their voter identity — and moves it into the Reported-Corrupted Set.

If enough reports accumulate, the batch can be shuffled and unlocked separately to produce the Reported-Corrupted Sum.

Why False Claims Don’t Pay

The self-penalizing case is a voter who falsely reports corruption when their originally submitted ballot did actually reflect their intended vote.

That ballot moves into the Reported-Corrupted Sum. This only makes their preferred candidate lose a legitimate vote from the Uncorrupted Total.

Honest voters who were actually wronged face no such penalty: the ballot never reflected their intent, so reporting it removes a vote that was never truly theirs.

Software Independent Verification Numbers Vote Seller's Dilemma