Mitigating Coercion, Maximizing Confidence in Postal Elections

Elections have traditionally depended on procedural safeguards and best practices to ensure integrity and instill trust. By making it difficult for individuals to manipulate ballots undetected, these policies electoral malfeasance. Even so, it is clearly preferable to move beyond this kind of best-effort security and instead provide strong guarantees of integrity and privacy.

An emerging literature on voting systems has identified two distinct approaches towards this end: build trust worthiness into the voting system, or audit the election after-the-fact to verify its integrity. The first strategy is embodied by end-to-end verifiable voting systems, which use cryptography to prove to the voter that their ballot was cast and tallied as intended. However, these systems are predicated on strong assumptions and use complicated, difficult-to-understand cryptography to deliver their security guarantees. Instead of attempting to provide these strict assurances, the auditing approach aims to output statistical evidence that an election was conducted properly.