(2026-03) Aggregator-Based Voting using proof of Partition
2026-03-19
We present Aggios, a scalable and privacy preserving proxy voting system designed for frequent and large-scale elections such as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), when storing votes on the bulletin board is expensive. To this end, Aggios introduces `aggregators': entities to which voters delegate their votes, and who then post their batched proofs on the public ledger. Aggios achieves strong integrity guarantees: only authorized voters can vote, votes are counted correctly, voters are assured their vote is counted.
At the core of Aggios, lies a novel zero-knowledge argument, which we call the Extended Partition Argument (EPA), that allows a prover to demonstrate that a committed vector can be decomposed into multiple disjoint ``subvectors'' forming a partition, each subvector of public (or not) sizes. The argument is compatible with a universal SRS, does not require precomputation, and offers efficient proving and verification complexity. We prove security of the EPA in the algebraic group model. Our implementation of EPA shows suitability of the argument even for very large vectors.
Using the EPA as the central block to Aggios, we show that our voting scheme is at least 512 times more compact than naive casting of votes, and can even be size-independent of the number of voters in the optimal case, thus offering a practical route to frequent and privacy-preserving voting at scale.