Uncoercible anonymous electronic voting

Abstract

Due to convenience and efficiency, electronic voting (e-voting) techniques gradually replace traditional paper-based voting activities in some developed countries. A secure anonymous e-voting system has to satisfy many properties, such as completeness, tally correctness, and uncoercibility, where the uncoercibility property is the most difficult one to be achieved. Since each voter can obtain a voting receipt in an electronic voting system, coercibility and bribe (vote-buying and vote-selling are included) become more and more serious in electronic voting environments than traditional paper-based voting environments. Unfortunately, most of the solutions, like receipt-freeness or untappable channels, proposed in the literature, are impractical owing to lack of efficiency or too complicated to be implemented. It will make uncoercible e-voting systems unacceptable by the people. In order to cope with the drawbacks of the previous schemes, this paper will present a generic idea, which is independent of the underlying cryptographic components, on electronic voting to achieve the uncoercibility property and other requirements. The proposed method is an efficient and quite practical solution to match the current environments of electronic voting.