Human Factors in Coercion Resistant Internet Voting–A Review of Existing Solutions and Open Challenges

While Internet voting has a potential of improving the democratic processes, it introduces new challenges to the security of the election, such as the possibility of voter coercion due to voting in uncontrolled environments. Cryptographic research has resulted in a number of proposals for protecting against such coercion with the help of counter-strategies that can be used by the voter to convince the coercer that they obeyed their instructions while secretly voting for another voting option. So far, these proposals have been theoretical, and their usability in terms of ability of the voter to apply the counter-strategies in practice has not been thoroughly investigated. We conducted a literature review to identify the available counter-strategies and assumptions on voters’ capabilities. We evaluated the identified assumptions and conclude a number of usability issues. We provide recommendations on further research directions and practical considerations in designing coercion resistant voting systems are provided.