TRIP: Trustless Coercion-Resistant In-Person Voter Registration
Louis-Henri Merino, Simone Colombo, Jeff Allen, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes,
and Bryan Ford
arXiv preprint
Abstract:
Most existing remote electronic voting systems are vulnerable to voter coercion
and vote buying. While coercion-resistant voting systems address this
challenge, current schemes assume that the voter has access to an untappable,
incorruptible device during voter registration. We present TRIP, an in-person
voter registration scheme enabling voters to create verifiable and
indistinguishable real and fake credentials using an untrusted kiosk inside a
privacy booth at a supervised location, e.g., the registrar’s office. TRIP
ensures the integrity of the voter’s real credential while enabling the
creation of fake credentials using interactive zero-knowledge proofs between
the voter as the verifier and the kiosk as the prover, unbeknownst to the
average voter. TRIP ensures that even voters who are under extreme coercion,
and cannot leave the booth with a real credential, can delegate their vote to a
political party, with the caveat that they must then trust the kiosk. TRIP
optimizes the tallying process by limiting the number of credentials a voter
can receive and capping the number of votes that a credential can cast per
election. We conduct a preliminary usability study among 41 participants at a
university and found that 42.5% of participants rated TRIP a B or higher in
usability, a promising result for a voter registration scheme that
substantially reduces trust in the registrar.
Preprint:
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