Open Access

ARTICLE

Somewhat Deniable Voting: Coercion-Resistant Electronic Voting Scheme with Privacy Preservation Property

Mingxuan Jia, Chenglong Shi, Yang Ye, Wen Huang, Jian Peng^*

College of Computer Science, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China

* Corresponding Author: Jian Peng. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2026, 89(1), 75 https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2026.084123

Received 16 April 2026; Accepted 11 July 2026; Issue published 13 August 2026

Abstract

With the development of electronic voting schemes, traditional on-site voting is gradually being replaced because of its organizational inconveniences. However, electronic voting takes place in an uncontrollable environment, which opens up the possibility of voter coercion. In this paper, we propose an electronic voting scheme with the property of coercion resistance and privacy preservation. In particular, we introduce the concept of somewhat deniable voting. Somewhat deniable voting gives up verifiability to some extent but not all in exchange for coercion resistance under the condition that the election result remains unchanged. Besides, a somewhat deniable voting scheme is a local differential privacy mechanism with an adjustable privacy guarantee from the perspective of local differential privacy. Thus, the somewhat deniable voting scheme is a new kind of voting scheme that lies between real-name voting schemes and anonymous voting schemes. Specifically, the somewhat deniable voting scheme gradually becomes an anonymous voting scheme from a real-name voting scheme by adjusting a parameter named deniability confidence. To demonstrate somewhat deniable voting, we design a scheme for somewhat deniable voting and perform extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed voting scheme.

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Keywords

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