Electoral Integrity Without Disenfranchisement: Verifiable, Coercion-Resistant Voting as a Response to Vote-Buying in Bulgaria

Since 2021 Bulgaria has experienced acute political instability — eight early parliamentary elections by 2026 — alongside a contested "machine-voting saga" and persistent concerns, noted by international observers, about vote-buying and undue influence on voters in socially vulnerable communities. This paper argues that the right response is not to test, screen or exclude voters, but to redesign the process so that the vote-buying transaction becomes unverifiable to the buyer while the result remains verifiable to everyone — fully within the guarantees of universal, equal, free, secret and direct suffrage. It sets out a rights-respecting architecture built on established methods: end-to-end verifiable voting with receipt-freeness and coercion resistance (so that a voter cannot prove how they voted), anonymous cryptographic credentials that guarantee uniqueness without linking identity to choice, voter-verified paper trails, open-source and air-gapped equipment, ballot-order randomisation that neutralises "vote for number 7" instructions without excluding anyone, and risk-limiting audits.

It explicitly rejects knowledge or "competence" tests as a condition to vote and any measure that breaks ballot secrecy, which violate universal suffrage and the Venice Commission's standards and disproportionately harm the elderly, people with disabilities and minority communities. The paper recommends a transparent, well-consulted, phased reform with public source code and full observer access.