Manifest must be stored and checked each time its used.

[JohnLCaron]

The idea here is an attacker manages to insert a modified manifest into your encryptor, if you store the manifest as a plaintext file somewhere. You have to be able to verify that the plaintext file matches the ByteArray used when generating Hm, Hb and He. EGK just uses the He stored in electionInit to do encryption.

So what if manifest has been hacked, and attacker can feed bogus ballots to the encryptor? One could set contestLimit to > 1 and vote > 1. I think the encryption would validate.