Coercion is pressure on a person to vote, express a view, or stay silent in a particular way, through threat, reward, or supervision. Vote buying is one form; an employer, family member, or community watching how someone votes is another. Ballot secrecy and criminal law are the main defenses, but coercion is a social problem, and My Vote Forward does not claim that any technology removes it.
Definition
The site glossary defines coercion as pressure on a person to vote, express, or withhold a view in a particular way, through threat, reward, or supervision, and notes that it can come from employers, households, or communities (see the short entry in the glossary). U.S. federal criminal law describes the conduct in its own words: 18 U.S.C. 594 applies to whoever “intimidates, threatens, coerces, or attempts to intimidate, threaten, or coerce, any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of such other person to vote or to vote as he may choose” in federal elections, with a penalty of a fine, up to one year in prison, or both.1
In voting technology research, coercion is modeled as an adversary who can make demands. Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson describe an adversary who may “demand of coerced voters that they vote in a particular manner, abstain from voting, or even disclose their secret keys”.2 Forced abstention, keeping someone from voting at all, is coercion too.
Origin and history
Coercion is the reason the secret ballot exists. The Australian Electoral Commission notes that before the 1850s “people voted publicly, which left them vulnerable to intimidation and coercion,” which led to the “Australian ballot”.3 Making the ballot secret removed the coercer’s ability to check compliance: a voter can promise anything and then vote freely. The history of intimidation at the polls and the legal responses to it are covered in Intimidation and Secret ballot.
How coercion is countered and assessed
Defenses work at three levels.
- Law. Statutes such as 18 U.S.C. 594 make intimidation and coercion crimes.1 Enforcement depends on reports and evidence, which coerced people are often unable to provide.
- Procedure. Supervised polling places, private booths, and rules about who may be present reduce the chance that someone watches a vote.
- Design. A voting system is coercion-resistant if the coercer cannot tell whether the voter obeyed.2 Receipts that let a voter prove their vote to others would undo this, which is why verifiable systems are designed so that a receipt “does not reveal to anyone how they voted,” as the U.S. Voluntary Voting System Guidelines 2.0 put it.4
Remote voting is the hardest case. When a person votes from home, no booth separates them from household members. Research designs for coercion-resistant remote voting exist, but they add complexity that ordinary voters may find hard to use, and none is presented here as solving the problem.
Common confusions and neighboring terms
- Coercion vs. persuasion. Persuasion offers reasons a person can accept or reject freely. Coercion attaches consequences to the choice.
- Coercion vs. secrecy. Secrecy is the main structural defense against coercion; coercion is the threat secrecy answers.
- Coercion vs. intimidation. Intimidation is coercion by fear; vote buying is coercion by reward. Both are covered by the general term.
- Coercion vs. social pressure to publish. In a system where people may publish opinions, pressure to publish, or to publish a particular view, is a form of coercion the system must anticipate.
How My Vote Forward uses the term
My Vote Forward treats coercion as a design constraint. Opinions are private by default, so no one should be able to demand to see them, and publication is a separate, specific choice. Ballot-like actions are never publishable. The framework’s Intimidation chapter discusses household and workplace pressure on remote participants and states that technology does not remove it. Any future real voting would require the coercion protections of an authorized election process; none exists.
What My Vote Forward can and cannot do here
My Vote Forward can avoid features that create proof of a choice, keep opinions private by default, and let people revise or withdraw what they publish. It cannot see or prevent pressure inside a household or workplace, and it cannot enforce election law. It cannot verify that a person chose freely. Demo participation is simulated.
Unresolved questions
- Should a participant be able to revise a private opinion after a coerced session, and could such revisions be used to signal compliance?
- How should a system handle shared devices, where one household member may see another’s activity?
- Can social pressure to publish opinions be measured, and at what level should it change the design?
Sources
- 18 U.S.C. 594, Intimidation of voters. law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/594
- Ari Juels, Dario Catalano, and Markus Jakobsson, “Coercion-Resistant Electronic Elections,” Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2002/165. eprint.iacr.org/2002/165
- Australian Electoral Commission, “Voting history” (The Secret Ballot). aec.gov.au/About_AEC/25/theme1-voting-history.htm
- U.S. Election Assistance Commission, Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Version 2.0, February 10, 2021 (glossary entry for cryptographic E2E verifiable voting systems). eac.gov/…
