The balance between coercion-resistance, election verifiability and usability remains unresolved in remote electronic voting despite significant research over the last few years. We propose a change of perspective, replacing the requirement of coercion-resistance with a new requirement of coercionevidence: there should be public evidence of the amount of coercion that has taken place during a particular execution of the voting system. We provide a formal definition of coercion-evidence that has two parts. Firstly, there should be a coercion-evidence test that can be performed against the bulletin board to accurately determine the degree of coercion that has taken place in any given run. Secondly, we require coercer independence, that is the ability of the voter to follow the protocol without being detected by the coercer. To show how coercion-evidence can be achieved, we propose a new remote voting scheme, Caveat Coercitor, and we prove that it satisfies coercion-evidence. Moreover, Caveat Coercitor makes weaker trust assumptions than other remote voting systems, such as JCJ/Civitas and Helios, and has better usability properties.
Abstract. Individual verifiability is the ability of an electronic voting system to convince a voter that his vote has been correctly counted in the tally. Unfortunately, in most electronic voting systems the proofs for individual verifiability are non-intuitive and, moreover, need trusted devices to be checked. Based on the remote voting system JCJ/Civitas, we propose Trivitas, a protocol that achieves direct and end-to-end individual verifiability, while at the same time preserving coercion-resistance.Our technical contributions rely on two main ideas, both related to the notion of credentials already present in JCJ/Civitas. Firstly, we propose the use of trial credentials, as a way to track and audit the handling of a ballot from one end of the election system to the other end, without increased complexity on the voter end. Secondly, due to indistinguishability of credentials from random values, we observe that the association between any credential and its corresponding vote can be made public at the end of the election process, without compromising coercion-resistance. The voter has more intuitive and direct evidence that her intended vote has not been changed and will be counted in the final tally.
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