"You Shall Not Abstain!" A Formal Study of Forced Participation

Wojciech Jamroga, Peter B. Roenne, Yan Kim, Peter Y. A. Ryan

Abstract: In this paper we revisit the idea of participation privacy in secure voting, i.e., when public data does not reveal whether a given voter participated in the election. This is an important property, especially when defining coercion-resistance preventing forced abstention attacks, and it is frequently mentioned as one of the main necessary conditions. However, what has been largely overlooked in the secure voting literature, is the idea of preventing forced participation attacks, i.e., where a voter is forced, or more subtly feels forced, to participate in an election. Whereas a high participation rate might seem like a desirable democratic property, there are cases when a part of the society wants to boycott the vote, e.g., in order to express its disapproval, or to prevent the proposed legislation. We logically formalise the idea of resistance to forced participation and, perhaps surprisingly, show that it is to some extent dual to forced abstention resistance. We also give intuitive examples of systems that satisfy one, but not the other.

External IDs:dblp:conf/fc/JamrogaRKR24