What did I really vote for? On the usability of verifiable e-voting schemes

E-voting has been embraced by a number of countries, delivering benefits in terms of efficiency and accessibility. End-to-end verifiable e-voting schemes facilitate verification of the integrity of individual votes during the election process. In particular, methods for cast-as-intended verification enable voters to confirm that their cast votes have not been manipulated by the voting client. A well-known technique for effecting cast-as-intended verification is the Benaloh Challenge. The usability of this challenge is crucial because voters have to be actively engaged in the verification process. In this paper, we report on a usability evaluation of three different approaches of the Benaloh Challenge in the remote e-voting context. We performed a comparative user study with 95 participants. We conclude with a recommendation for which approaches should be provided to afford verification in real-world elections and suggest usability improvements

Recommendations for E-Voting System Usability: Lessons from Literature for Interface Design, User Studies and Usability Criteria

These recommendations are for use in the following: E-Voting System Interface Design User Studies Usability Criteria While studies in the literature focus on a variety of e‐voting systems, including voting machines and punch cards, the recommendations here are for Internet‐based and cryptographically‐verifiable voting systems. Readers interested in more information i

Biometric System Based Electronic Voting Machine with security algorithm and password protection on ARM Microcontroller and GSM

Electronic voting meant for casting vote and counting votes electronically. This voting technology include punch cards, optical scan voting systems and Direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems. It can also involve transmission of ballots and votes via telephones, private computer networks, or the Internet. Electronic voting systems has much more advantages compared to other voting techniques. An electronic voting system can be involved in any one of a number of steps in the setup, distributing, voting, collecting, and counting of ballots, and thus may or may not introduce advantages into any of these steps. The main aim of this project is develop a Electronic Voting Machine with maximum security facilities

Voter Confidence in 2010: Voter Identification, Perceptions of Fraud, Winning and Losing and the Voter Experience

Over the last decade, scholars of American politics have invested research time and effort into the study of election administration and election performance. These include studies onresidual vote analysis (Wand et al 2001; Ansolabhere and Stewart 2005; Mebane 2004), election auditing (Atkeson, Alvarez and Hall 2009; Ansolabehere and Reeves 2004), the role of pollworkers (Hall, Monston and Patterson; Clausen et al, Atkeson et al 2009), the role of technology (Tomz and Van Howling 2003; Avarez and Hall 2004; Stein et al 2008; Knack and Kropf 2003;Kimball and Kropf 2005, 2008), provisional votes (Atkeson, Alvarez and Hall 2009; Alvarez and Hall 2009; Pitts and Neuman 2009; Kimball and Foley 2009), voter identification (Pitts andNeuman 2009; Atkeson et al 2010, Ansolabehere 2009; Cobb, Greiner, and Quinn 2010), and voter confidence (Bullock, Hood 2005; Atkeson and Saunders 2007; Alvarez, Hall andLlewellyn 2008; Murphy, Johnson and Bowler 2010; Magleby et al 2010) among others. These studies have been in direct response to the presidential election meltdown in 2000, which for thepublic focused largely on Florida, but was also seen in other states, especially those where the race was very close, including New Mexico and Ohio (Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project,2001; Atkeson and Tafoya 2005). This work has been highly productive creating new linkages between political scientists, local election officials, and legal professional to create a data drivenapproach to election reform and a push to improve and modernize the local election systems across the nation (Gerken 2009; Atkeson et al 2010, 2011; Alvarez et al 2009)

Election Security Is Harder Than You Think

Recent years have seen the rise of nation-state interference in elections across the globe, making the ever-present need for more secure elections all the more dire. While certain common-sense approaches have been a typical response in the past, e.g. ``don't connect voting machines to the Internet'' and ``use a voting system with a paper trail'', known-good solutions to improving election security have languished in relative obscurity for decades. These techniques are only now finally being implemented at scale, and that implementation has brought the intricacies of sophisticated approaches to election security into full relief. This dissertation argues that while approaches to improve election security like paper ballots and post-election audits seem straightforward, in reality there are significant practical barriers to sufficient implementation. Overcoming these barriers is a necessary condition for an election to be secure, and while doing so is possible, it requires significant refinement of existing techniques. In order to better understand how election security technology can be improved, I first develop what it means for an election to be secure. I then delve into experimental results regarding voter-verified paper, discussing the challenges presented by paper ballots as well as some strategies to improve the security they can deliver. I examine the post-election audit ecosystem and propose a manifest improvement to audit workload analysis through parallelization. Finally, I show that even when all of these conditions are met (as in a vote-by-mail scenario), there are still wrinkles that must be addressed for an election to be truly secure.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163272/1/matber_1.pd

Designing the vote : an exploration of electronic voting as a tool for political participation

PhD ThesisThis thesis describes my attempt to envisage electronic voting as a tool for political engagement by challenging the conventional understanding of the role of technology in democracy as only facilitating ‘politics’ referring to the means, structures and mechanisms that enable governing. This entails the reappropriation of voting as a tool that embeds methods for dissent to be democratically manifested, and the discovery of novel ways with which voting systems can be designed to encourage citizen involvement in political processes; from setting up polls and political canvassing to voting and political deliberation. I materialize this novel conceptualization of voting by introducing a design framework that enables us to rethink the capacities of systems to support various democratic contexts. We instantiate this framework for the design and development of novel voting prototypes that we later deploy in collaboration with local communities in Newcastle upon Tyne and Cambridge in order to gain an understanding of how their affordances and contextual parameters influence political participation. As a result, in this thesis we present a number of case studies incorporating new designs, empirical methods and findings that begin to explore this conceptualisation of voting as a tool for political engagement. More specifically, we explore: (i) the reappropriation of voting as not only supporting the doing of politics, but also the participation of the involved stakeholders in a political process; (ii) the capacities of voting systems that enable this profound citizen participation to be materialised in local contexts and the possible change that might result from this; and (iii) the contextual parameters affecting citizen engagement in voting such as the system’s ownership and the authority to drive political agendas. In doing so, we offer new insights into the potential of voting to support political engagement and participation

Ηλεκτρονική ψηφοφορία (e-voting): Προοπτικές εισαγωγής της μεθόδου στην Ελλάδα

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι η μελέτη της πρακτικής της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας (e-voting). Ως εναλλακτικός τρόπος άσκησης του εκλογικού δικαιώματος, η ηλεκτρονική ψηφοφορία είναι μια νέα πρακτική, η οποία παρουσιάζει ερευνητικό ενδιαφέρον. Η υιοθέτησή της έχει πολλές πρακτικές πτυχές που παρουσιάζουν ενδιαφέρον. Η επιτυχής υιοθέτηση της μεθόδου απαιτεί την εφαρμογή πορισμάτων πολλών τομέων της επιστήμης. Για το λόγο αυτό συνδέει την εξέλιξή της με τις ισχύουσες στο Δίκαιο αρχές. Στα πλαίσια της ανάλυσης της προβληματικής της υιοθέτησης της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας, η εργασία πραγματεύεται το ζήτημα της υιοθέτησης της επιστολικής ψήφου. Συγκεκριμένα εξετάζονται τόσο οι θεσμικές παρεμβάσεις που απαιτούνται, όσο και οι πρακτικές πλευρές του ζητήματος. Η εργασία αναλύει την επιστολική ψήφο, τόσο από απόψεως των όσων προβλέπονται στο Σύνταγμα της Ελλάδος 1975/1986/2001/2008, όσο και από την σκοπιά της διεθνούς εμπειρίας από την εφαρμογή της. Η παρουσίαση της επιστολικής ψήφου μας βοηθά στην κατανόηση της προβληματικής, καθώς αποτελεί θεσμό εξ' αποστάσεως άσκησης του εκλογικού δικαιώματος. Εξετάζεται, αν η υιοθέτηση της επιστολικής ψήφου έχει αντίκτυπο στην υιοθέτηση της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας. Η επιτυχής υιοθέτηση του θεσμού απαιτεί την εισαγωγή των κατάλληλων συστημάτων. H εργασία αναλύει τη λειτουργία των συστημάτων ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας, τις προϋποθέσεις για την ορθή λειτουργία τους και παρουσιάζει την κρυπτογραφία, η οποία αποτελεί πολύ σημαντικό παράγοντα για την επιτυχία των συστημάτων ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας. Η εργασία επιχειρεί να αναδείξει τον προβληματισμό του συγκερασμού των συνταγματικών αρχών που διέπουν την ψήφο και την ψηφοφορία με την υιοθέτηση της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας. Διερευνούμε το ερώτημα αν με την υιοθέτηση της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας διαφυλάσσονται οι συνταγματικές εκλογικές αρχές. Εξετάζουμε τόσο τις θεσμικές παραμέτρους που επηρεάζουν την εφαρμογή του θεσμού, όσο και την ύπαρξη ψυχολογικών παραγόντων που επηρεάζουν την υιοθέτηση της μεθόδου της ηλεκτρονικής ψηφοφορίας. Παρουσιάζουμε επίσης εκτενώς την διεθνή και ελληνική εμπειρία από τις προσπάθειες για την υιοθέτηση της μεθόδου. Επιχειρούμε, τέλος, να αναδείξουμε τις θεσμικές παρεμβάσεις που θα πρέπει να υιοθετηθούν, προκειμένου να επιτύχει η εισαγωγή της μεθόδου