Vote Selling Resistant Voting

Abstract

Creating a secure (purely) remote voting scheme which prevents active vote selling is an open problem. Observing that vote selling has a primarily economic motivation, we propose a novel approach to the problem which prevents a vote seller from profiting by allowing a different party to choose the seller’s vote. As a proof of concept, we propose a concrete protocol which involves carefully restricting the ways the voter can prove how they voted and then penalising them for revealing it. With the assumption that the vote seller and vote buyer are mutually distrustful, we show that our protocol admits no situation where the buyer and seller can achieve a mutually agreeable selling price. We include a sample instantiation of our protocol demonstrating that it can be practically implemented including the outlay of a smart contract in Solidity.