Public Policy Researcher Adriá Rodríguez-Pérez Defends PhD Thesis

Yesterday, our Public Policy Researcher, Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez, successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled Secret texts and cipherballots: secret suffrage and remote electronic voting, as part of the doctorate program at the University Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona. In his thesis, Adrià explores the intricacies of what “secret suffrage” implies in different legal contexts, distilling the concept to three key factors: the ability for each voter to make an individual choice, the ability for each voter to make a private and confidential choice, and the ability for every ballot cast to remain anonymous. He also explores how these factors of secret suffrage can be applied to online voting, analyzing different international standards for e-voting and examining online voting experiences in France, Switzerland, and Estonia. Adrià  ultimately recommends that electoral administrations looking to implement online voting solutions should ensure that those solutions are equipped with coercion-resistant mechanisms, quantum-resistant vote encryption, and anonymous tallying protocols in order to protect secret suffrage to the fullest extent.