The Council of Europe’s CM/Rec(2017)5 on e-voting and Secret Suffrage: Time for yet Another Update?
Adrià Rodríguez-Pérez · Lecture notes in computer science · 2022
Abstract The Council of Europe’s Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)5 on e-voting remains the main international legal standard in the field. According to the updated Recommendation, e-voting should respect all the principles for democratic elections. This includes, of course, the principle of secret suffrage. Provisions on secret suffrage are dispersed throughout Rec(2017)5 and its related documents. The main provisions can be found in Section IV of Appendix I, but the principle is also mentioned in several other sections, in the Explanatory Memorandum, and in the Guidelines. A detailed analysis of all these provisions reveals important flaws in the understanding of secret suffrage in (remote) e-voting. Some of the flaws are the result of an inaccurate understanding of secret suffrage, in which this principle is mixed with provisions on personal data protection. In other cases, the flaws are due to analogies being drawn with paper-based voting channels, which prevent the standards from taking stock of the specificities of (remote) e-voting. In this paper I provide a detailed account of these flaws. I also suggest some alternative approaches and wording for the provisions on secret suffrage. Lastly, I discuss the desirability and feasibility of different alternatives regarding the review of Rec(2017)5.