Ballot stuffing is the repeated or fraudulent submission of votes to distort the outcome of a poll, election, award vote, or online survey. In cyber security, it is a form of input abuse: the attacker tries to make one person, device, or bot farm count as many voters. The goal may be to inflate a preferred candidate’s total, bury a rival, or undermine trust in the result.
It matters because digital voting systems often rely on remote users, which makes them vulnerable to automation, fake accounts, credential abuse, and session replay. Defenses commonly include identity verification, rate limiting, CAPTCHA, device fingerprinting, duplicate detection, audit logs, and anomaly review. Good design also makes the tally explainable, so organizers can prove that each ballot was accepted once and counted correctly. When these controls are weak or opaque, even a valid result can be questioned.