Coercion and Corruption in Unsupervised Voting

From Blindside

Voting can be supervised or unsupervised. Supervised voting requires electors to travel to some formal polling station and make their choices in a polling booth which offers both privacy to cast a secret ballot and also oversight by election officials to check that the voter is not being harassed or coerced in the act of voting. Often, the election officials are from rival parties, and they observe not only voters but each other to ensure fair play.

Unsupervised voting can occur anywhere. It has existed for many years in the form of the postal ballot, and some E-Voting schemes are promoted specifically because they enable unsupervised voting. Unsupervised voting seems to make for "easier democracy" by removing the need for people to travel to a polling station, for example when voting via the internet or mobile phone.

Supervised voting stops people being intimidated by offering quite a good guarantee that individuals' votes remain secret. Nobody can look over a voter's shoulder, and a voter cannot show a completed ballot paper to anyone.

While individuals can take steps to keep their unsupervised votes secret, an unsupervised vote can be coerced. "I want to see you vote for X or I'll beat the living daylights out of you," and the voter may have no choice. Influences may be more subtle, such as that of the head of the household over a family. This is particularly disadvantageous for less assertive individuals, especially those such as immigrants or young people who may not be familiar with the notion of the secret ballot. Even if a supervised secret ballot is offered as an option, someone can still coerce a vote by demanding that the voter uses the unsupervised method.

The possibility of unsupervised votes not being secret opens the door to corruption. Vote-buying and vote selling is rare in supervised voting, because the buyer cannot be sure that the vote cast by the seller in the private polling booth is the one the buyer has bought. The seller cannot just ask the buyer to "Trust me!" because the buyer knows the seller is already explicitly corrupt in selling their vote. However, with unsupervised voting, the seller can choose to reveal their vote, allow the buyer to look over their shoulder while they cast their vote. This risks creating a cash market in votes.

These risks of coercion and corruption exist for any form of unsupervised voting where it cannot be verified that the voter has cast their vote in private and kept it secret. Even if, for example, the challenge of identifying and authenticating remote electors is solved perfectly, the challenge of coercion and corruption remains.

In recent years, the UK government has promoted various forms of unsupervised voting in an attempt to increase election turnout. It is not clear that any thought has been given to the ways in which unsupervised voting can lead to coercion and corruption and thus discredit the election, leading to even more electors not bothering to vote.