Secret suffrage and the integrity of Internet voting: a false trade-off?

It is generally argued that one of the key challenges of Internet voting is that it aims at achieving both the secrecy of the vote and the integrity of elections. In this sense, the argument goes, the lack of transparency and auditability of transactions in Internet voting needed to ensure secrecy (i.e., in terms of confidentiality and anonymity) excludes a priori any step-by-step detailed account of the process in terms of its integrity (e.g., Oostveen & van den Besselaar, 2003; Schuermann and Loeber, 2018). In our opinion, a broader understanding of these two requirements is needed. From a human rights perspective, both the secrecy of the vote and the integrity of the election are aimed at fulfilling the principle of free suffrage. Should it be possible to run an (online) election in full transparency (i.e., open voting), free suffrage would not be observed either, since voters would be open to coercion and vote-buying. Thus, the results of a not-secret election with high integrity would not represent the genuine will of the people either. In this context, our goal is to highlight the close connection that exists between the principles of secret and free suffrage in Internet voting. To do so, a detailed analysis of the international standards on Internet voting and of the national experiences in Estonia, France, and Switzerland is provided. Following, we assess how different mechanisms, both technological (i.e., end-to-end verifiability) and procedural (i.e., audits, source code publication, public intrusion tests and bug bounties), aim at fulfilling both principles.