ELECTION INTEGRITYMaking E-voting Safer from Coercion and Vote Buying
As we come to the end of a year in which half the world’s population went to the polls, EPFL researchers developed and field-tested a groundbreaking new technology to protect remote electronic voting or e-voting from voter coercion and vote buying.
In 2024, national or regional elections were held in countries that are home to almost half of the world’s population. These elections have taken place amid growing geopolitical challenges and concerns in many countries about whether voting is free, fair and transparent.
Globally, in-person marked ballot papers are by far the most common form of voting. In-person voting isn’t perfect but it is the current state-of-the-art standard in coercion resistance. A voter shows their ID, enters a protected booth for privacy, marks their ballot paper and puts it in the ballot box, while the entire process is normally watched by independent observers.
Remote, online e-voting is attractive for its convenience and potentially increased voter turnout. Today’s state-of-the-art technology can make e-voting universally verifiable – so that anyone, not just election officials and observers, can verify that votes have been tallied correctly. Most online voting systems are more susceptible than in-person voting to vote buying and voter coercion, however, such as another person sitting next to the voter and telling them how to cast their ballot.
Fake Credentials for Safer E-voting
As bizarre as it may sound, one promising strategy to overcome this vulnerability to coercion is officially-sanctioned digital fakery. Experimental e-voting systems enable voters to create fake voting credentials that voters may give – or sell – to a coercer, who has no way to detect if these credentials are valid or not. Votes cast using fake voting credentials are silently discarded and don’t count in the election.
Important questions remain, however. Do ordinary voters comprehend the threat of coercion when it comes to online voting? Do they think it’s important? Would they understand, and correctly apply, a mitigation technology using fake credentials?
To try to answer these questions, EPFL researchers in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences undertook a systematic study of 150 participants in Boston, in the United States, who “registered” and “voted” in a mock election. In their paper, presented at the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the researchers describe how 120 of the participants were exposed to fake credentials while the rest formed a control group.
