Framework for practical and receipt‐free remote voting

Abstract

Remote voting allows the voters to cast their votes remotely at their convenience, and it is desirable in many circumstances. In the literature, a number of verifiable remote voting schemes have been introduced recently. However, some of these schemes are only suitable for the low coercion environment. Since without the receipt-freeness guarantee, voters can be coerced or bribed to vote the candidate favoured by adversaries. Some other schemes provide a very high level of security assurance, e.g. coercion resistance, but these schemes are normally very complex, and ordinary voters are required to perform complicated crypto calculations. In this study, the authors introduce a generic framework for practical and receipt-free remote voting. In their proposed scheme, voters do not need to have special knowledge or use any trusted device to cast their votes, and meanwhile, they cannot prove to the others how they have voted.