Coercion-resistant electronic elections with write-in candidates

  • Authors:
  • Carmen Kempka

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute of Cryptography and Security, Faculty of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

  • Venue:
  • EVT/WOTE'12 Proceedings of the 2012 international conference on Electronic Voting Technology/Workshop on Trustworthy Elections
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

It is often argued in the e-voting community that in the presence of write-in candidates, forced abstention attacks are always possible. Therefore, write-in candidates are often excluded in existing definitions of coercion-resistance arguing that those definitions cannot be achieved by write-in supporting schemes. This is only true if the tally is made public directly. Coercion-resistance may well be achieved if only a fuzzy version of the tally is published. This paper provides a formalization of fuzzy tally representations which enables definitions for coercion-resistance to take into account write-in candidates without being weakened. We also show how the cryptographic voting scheme Bingo Voting can be applied to write-in candidates with respect to this formalization, providing what we believe to be the first e-voting scheme that prevents forced abstention while allowing for write-in candidates. We then give a general construction of coercion-resistant schemes that provide a verifiable fuzzy tally representation from mix-based and homomorphic election schemes with trusted authority.