E-Vote Your Conscience: Perceptions of Coercion and Vote Buying, and the Usability of Fake Credentials in Online Voting

TL;DR

The paper addresses coercion resistance in online voting by evaluating fake credentials through the TRIP registration framework. It conducts a field-like usability study with 150 diverse participants, assessing comprehension, trust, and end-to-end usability of real and fake credentials, including a malicious kiosk scenario. Key findings show 96% understood fake credentials, 90% could activate the real credential, 53% would create fake credentials, and 83% successfully complete registration and activation without assistance, with SUS averaging 70.4. The results support the potential of fake credentials to mitigate coercion while highlighting important usability challenges that warrant further refinement for real-world deployment.

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.

Figures (12)

• Figure 1: TRIP Paper Credential. Figures (a) and (b) present the paper credential's elements and Figures (c) and (d) present the paper credential's transport and activate states.
• Figure 2: Study Setup: Starting on the left chair, participants (1) review the study's information sheet and sign the consent form, (2) watch an instructional video on the laptop, (3) are handed a check-in ticket from the facilitator, (4) move to the right chair and interact with the kiosk to create their credential(s), (5) return to the left chair for check-out, (6) activate their credential(s) and cast mock votes on the supplied mobile device, and, (7) complete the study's exit survey on either our laptop or touchscreen tablet.
• Figure 3: Study Flow. Participants first watch one of three instructional videos, then interact with either an honest or malicious kiosk that displays the corresponding quizzes. The distinguish credentials quiz is present for those who created at least one fake credential.
• Figure 4: Steps Overview. Various screenshots from the instructional video, which demonstrate each phase.
• Figure 5: Distribution of Participant Ages. The minimum, median, mean and maximum ages among all groups were 19, 36.5, 44 and 83, respectively. Six participants did not disclose their age.