New e-voting system to flag up coercion

SAN FRANCISCO - University of Birmingham (UK) computer scientists have devised an e-voting system that can identify and monitor any votes that could have taken place under coercion, they announced at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy on 21 May 2013. The internet-based system, called Caveat Coercitor, is designed to flag up any votes made by voters that are coerced. For example, a coercer might change a legitimate vote by installing malware on the victim's computer, or vote on their behalf by stealing their voting password from the post. Such votes will be flagged up to the authorities so that they can be discarded, and their impact on the final result can be analysed. These analyses are made publicly available for anyone to verify. Currently, in postal voting, there is no way of ascertaining whether a voter has been coerced or intimidated into voting a certain way, or choosing a particular candidate. The researchers are concerned about the potential for coercion in postal and internet voting, but so far it has proved very difficult to design voting systems which resist coercion completely.