Coercion-Resistant Blockchain-Based E-Voting Protocol

Coercion resistance is one of the most important features of a secure voting procedure. Because of the properties such as transparency, decentralization, and non-repudiation, blockchain is a fundamental technology of great interest in its own right, and it also has large potential when integrated into many other areas. Here we propose a decentralized e-voting protocol that is coercion-resistant and vote-selling resistant, while being also completely transparent and not receipt-free. We prove the security of the protocol under the standard DDH assumption

Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

HandiVote: simple, anonymous, and auditable electronic voting

We suggest a set of procedures utilising a range of technologies by which a major democratic deficit of modern society can be addressed. The mechanism, whilst it makes limited use of cryptographic techniques in the background, is based around objects and procedures with which voters are currently familiar. We believe that this holds considerable potential for the extension of democratic participation and control

Corporate Voting and the Takeover Debate

Shareholder voting is the key to the outcome of hostile takeovers. The most obvious example arises when an acquirer tries to unseat a corporate board in a proxy contest for corporate control. But shareholder votes are needed in almost all other takeover settings as well. For instance, when a bidder announces a hostile tender offer, a resistant target company\u27s board of directors will normally use its poison pill antitakeover defense, or a combination of a poison pill and a classified board, to stop its shareholders from selling their shares to the bidder, forcing the bidder to engage in at least one proxy contest to obtain control.\u27 In addition, if the company is incorporated in one of the twenty-seven states that have control shareholder antitakeover statutes, the bidder can accumulate a significant stake in the target and demand a disinterested shareholder vote by the target company\u27s shareholders on whether the bidder\u27s stock should have voting rights. In all of these contested elections, the main issue before shareholders is whether to accept the hostile bid. Given the central importance of shareholder voting to corporate takeovers, legal academics have begun to model shareholder elections to gain insights into the ongoing debate over the efficiency of different forms of takeover techniques and antitakeover defenses. Professors Gilson and Schwartz have developed a voting model to explore the Delaware Supreme Court\u27s apparent preference for voting as a change of control mechanism. They claim that elections represent an inferior change of control mechanism compared to market transactions through tender offers, and that therefore the Delaware courts should overrule their prior decisions that allowed the use of defensive tactics as a means of defeating tender offers. Professors Bebchuk and Hart subsequently used a voting model to examine the differences between pure voting contests, pure takeover bids, and acquisition offers that combine voting contests and takeover bids. They argue that their model reveals that a combined proxy contest and tender offer is superior to either of the latter two. In this Article, we argue that these earlier models present a far too simple picture of the world. For example, both of the aforementioned papers assume that the every shareholder holds exactly one share of the company. Gilson and Schwartz further assume that every shareholder decides how to vote believing that that his or her vote will be pivotal. Bebchuk and Hart insist that all shareholders presume that current management is superior to any rival. But shareholders are heterogeneous in their stockholdings and voting behavior: they have different valuations of the target\u27s stock, hold different views of management and listen to different advice about how to cast their ballots. To realistically model shareholder voting behavior, one must explicitly incorporate each of these variables into the model. In this Article, we construct a simple model of shareholder voting that captures these important variables in five common shareholder voting scenarios. Initially, we examine routine shareholder voting contests, such as when incumbent management proposes the adoption of a stock option plan, or when shareholders are asked to vote on a shareholder proposal that has been placed on the corporate ballot using Rule 14a-. These are the most frequently occurring types of shareholder votes because these proposals are normally placed on the proxy card for the corporation\u27s annual shareholders\u27 meeting. Despite their importance, however, earlier models have completely disregarded this form of shareholder voting. The other four scenarios we model are takeover situations. The first is a proxy contest for corporate control, that is, a corporate election in which the incumbent management team is proposing to re- elect a slate of directors, while the dissident is offering a competing slate of candidates. The winner of the election will gain control of the firm. Next, we look at takeover bids, where the dissident is offering to purchase the shares of the target company\u27s shareholders but is forced by the presence of a poison pill to first try to unseat the target\u27s board of directors in a corporate election. Here, the presence of the takeover bid increases the chances that the dissident will win because target shareholders are more likely to vote in favor of selling their stock if the price is high enough

Receipt-Freeness and Coercion Resistance in Remote E-Voting Systems

Abstract: Remote electronic voting (E-voting) is a more convenient and efficient methodology when compared with traditional voting systems. It allows voters to vote for candidates remotely, however, remote E-voting systems have not yet been widely deployed in practical elections due to several potential security issues, such as vote-privacy, robustness and verifiability. Attackers' targets can be either voting machines or voters. In this paper, we mainly focus on three important security properties related to voters: receipt-freeness, vote-selling resistance, and voter-coercion resistance. In such scenarios, voters are willing or forced to cooperate with attackers. We provide a survey of existing remote E-voting systems, to see whether or not they are able to satisfy these three properties to avoid corresponding attacks. Furthermore, we identify and summarise what mechanisms they use in order to satisfy these three security properties

Vote buying revisited: implications for receipt-freeness

In this paper, we analyse the concept of vote buying based on examples that try to stretch the meaning of the concept. Which ex- amples can still be called vote buying, and which cannot? We propose several dimensions that are relevant to qualifying an action as vote buy- ing or not. As a means of protection against vote buying and coercion, the concept of receipt-freeness has been proposed. We argue that, in or- der to protect against a larger set of vote buying activities, the concept of receipt-freeness should be interpreted probabilistically. We propose a general definition of probabilistic receipt-freeness by adapting existing definitions of probabilistic anonymity to voting

Exit Polling in Canada: An Experiment

Although exit polling has not been used to study Canadian elections before, such polls have methodological features that make them a potentially useful complement to data collected through more conventional designs. This paper reports on an experiment with exit polling in one constituency in the 2003 Ontario provincial election. Using student volunteers, a research team at Wilfrid Laurier University conducted an exit poll in the bellwether constituency of Kitchener Centre to assess the feasibility of mounting this kind of study on a broader scale. The experiment was successful in a number of respects. It produced a sample of 653 voters that broadly reflected the partisan character of the constituency, and which can hence be used to shed light on patterns of vote-switching and voter motivations in that constituency. It also yielded insights about best practices in mounting an exit poll in the Ontario context, as well as about the potential for using wireless communication devices to transmit respondent data from the field. The researchers conclude that exit polling on a limited basis (selected constituencies) is feasible, but the costs and logistics associated with this methodology make a province-wide or country-wide study unsupportable at present