Who Was that Masked Voter? The Tally Won’t Tell!

Abstract

We consider elections that publish anonymised voted ballots or anonymised cast-vote records for transparency or verification purposes, investigating the implications for privacy, coercion, and vote selling and exploring how partially masking the ballots can alleviate these issues.

Risk Limiting Tallies (RLT), which reveal only a random sample of ballots, were previously proposed to mitigate some coercion threats. Masking some ballots provides coerced voters with plausible deniability, while risk-limiting techniques ensure that the required confidence level in the election result is achieved. Risk-Limiting Verification (RLV) extended this approach to masking a random subset of receipts or trackers.

Here we show how these ideas can be generalised and made more flexible and effective by masking at a finer level of granularity: at the level of the components of ballots. In particular, we consider elections involving complex ballots, where RLT may be vulnerable to pattern-based vote buying. We propose various measures of verifiability and coercion-resistance and investigate how several sampling/masking strategies perform against these measures. Using methods from coding theory, we analyse signature attacks, bounding the number of voters who can be coerced. We also define new quantitative measures for the level of coercion-resistance without plausible deniability and the level of vote-buying-resistance without “free lunch” vote sellers.

These results and the different strategies for masking ballots are of general interest for elections that publish ballots for auditing, verification, or transparency purposes.