Preventing coercion in E-voting: Be open and commit

Abstract

We present a game-theoretic approach to coercion-resistance from the point of view of an honest election authority that chooses between various protection methods with different levels of resistance and different implementation costs. We give a simple game model of the election and propose a preliminary analysis. It turns out that, in the games that we look at, Stackelberg equilibrium for the society does not coincide with maxmin, and it is always more attractive to the society than Nash equilibrium. This suggests that the society is better off if the security policy is publicly announced, and the authorities commit to it.