E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting
Louis-Henri Merino,
Alaleh Azhir,
Haoqian Zhang,
Simone Colombo,
Bernhard Tellenbach,
Vero Estrada-Galiñanes,
Bryan Ford
To appear in
45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
May 20-23, 2024
Abstract:
Online voting is attractive for convenience and accessibility, but is
more susceptible to voter coercion and vote buying than in-person voting.
One mitigation is to give voters fake voting credentials that they can
yield to a coercer. Fake credentials appear identical to real ones, but
cast votes that are silently omitted from the final tally. An important
unanswered question is how ordinary voters perceive such a mitigation:
whether they could understand and use fake credentials, and whether the
coercion risks justify the costs of mitigation. We present the first
systematic study of these questions, involving 150 diverse individuals in
Boston, Massachusetts. All participants “registered” and “voted” in a mock
election: 120 were exposed to coercion resistance via fake credentials, the
rest forming a control group. Of the 120 participants exposed to fake
credentials, 96% understood their use. 53% reported that they would create
fake credentials in a real-world voting scenario, given the opportunity.
10% mistakenly voted with a fake credential, however. 22% reported either
personal experience with or direct knowledge of coercion or vote-buying
incidents. These latter participants rated the coercion-resistant system
essentially as trustworthy as in-person voting via hand-marked paper
ballots. Of the 150 total participants to use the system, 87% successfully
created their credentials without assistance; 83% both successfully created
and properly used their credentials. Participants give a System Usability
Scale score of 70.4, which is slightly above the industry’s average score
of 68. Our findings appear to support the importance of the coercion
problem in general, and the promise of fake credentials as a possible
mitigation, but user error rates remain an important usability challenge
for future work.
Conference paper:
PDF
Extended version:
arXiv
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