The vVoteVerifier project is a stand-alone independent reference implementation of a verifier for the vVote system.
The vVote System is an end-to-end verifiable electronic election system based on the Prêt à Voter election scheme. 
vVote was designed and built to be used as part of the State Election taking place in Victoria, Australia in November 2014. 
vVote provides three core pieces of verifiable evidence including:
	- Cast-as-intended – That each vote was cast in the way it was intended.
	- Counted-as-cast – That each vote was counted in the way it was cast.
	- Universally verifiable tallying – That the tallying process is verifiable.

The verification process of the vVote system will focus specifically on a number of protocols or
processes carried out including:

	- Ballot generation – The Ballot Generation process takes place during the pre-voting stage of
	the election and involves the production of generic ballots containing randomly permuted
	candidate names along with the candidate permutations. The random candidate
	permutation is constructed using combined randomness values generated and
	communicated by a number of independent randomness generation servers. The
	verification process involves the auditing of a randomly selected set of generic ballots. Each
	audit involves the recalculation and verification of the generic ballot.

	- Vote packing – The Vote Packing process is used to reduce the amount of work carried out
	by the Mixnet during the tallying phase of the election. The vVote system uses a Mixnet to
	shuffle the voter preferences which are represented by re-encrypted candidate identifiers
	sorted into preference order. The vVote system uses a method of packing together multiple
	re-encrypted candidate identifiers before passing them to the Mixnet meaning far fewer
	ciphertexts require shuffling and decryption thereby producing significant efficiency
	benefits. The verification process is two-fold.
		1. The first check is used to verify that the ciphertexts provided to the Mixnet have
	been correctly packed according to the set of underlying voter preferences and that
	the packings match those that were input to the Mixnet.
		2. The second check is used to verify that the decryptions from the Mixnet,
	corresponding to packed plaintexts, correctly match the packing of the plaintext
	candidate identifiers using the claimed preferences from the Mixnet output.

	- Commits made to the Public WBB – The Public WBB is used by the system to make available
	publicly relevant information which can be used in the verification process for other
	components such as the Vote Packing and Ballot Generation processes. The Public WBB is
	simply updated once per day as separate commitments. Each commitment consists of a
	JSON message file, an attachment ZIP file and a JSON signature file. The verification process
	involves a check that for each commit a signature was correctly calculated over the data.
	This check is used to verify that information has not been modified or implanted onto the
	Public WBB in an unauthorised manner.
	
A detailed overview of the vVoteVerifier system and significant background information can be found in the included document - vVoteVerifier.pdf.
The deployment and user guide can be found in the included document - deployment_and_user_manual.pdf and can be used to setup and run the vVoteVerifier system.