A Usable Android Application Implementing Distributed Cryptography For Election Authorities

Although many electronic voting protocols have been proposed, their practical application faces various challenges. One of these challenges is, that these protocols require election authorities to perform complex tasks like generating keys in a distributed manner and decrypting votes in a distributed and verifiable manner. Although corresponding key generation and decryption protocols exist, they are not used in real-world elections for several reasons: The few existing implementations of these protocols and their corresponding interfaces are not designed for people with non technical background and thus not suitable for use by most election authorities. In addition, it is difficult to explain the security model of the protocols, but legal provisions generally require transparency. We implemented a smartphone application for election authorities featuring distributed key generation and verifiable distributed decryption of votes. In addition, we prepared education material throughout based on formulated metaphors for election authorities in order to explain the security of the application. We evaluated the usability of the application and understanding of the underlying security model, concluding that the application is usable for non-experts in computer science. While the participants were able to carry out the tasks, it became clear, that they did not have a clear understanding of the underlying security model, despite having viewed our educational material. We suggest improvements to this material as future work

The Applicability of Internet Voting in Africa

The covid-19 pandemic has brought about new ways of conducting business through the use of Information Communication Technologies and elections have not been spared either. Internet voting is another form of strengthening democracy through the use of Information Communication Technologies. Africa lags in the implementation of electronic voting, especially Internet voting. This chapter applied a critical socio-technical analysis that analyses factors that influence the applicability of Internet voting within the African context. The researcher applied desktop research which included 30 journals to gather data from the Internet and other documentation sources. The findings reveal that decision-makers can partially implement Internet voting in some of the countries in Africa like Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Morocco, Mauritius, Tunisia, and Seychelles. To successfully implement Internet voting, the decision-makers in African nations have to fully invest in the Information Communication Technology infrastructure, provide the necessary security, legislation and carry out intensive voter education to build trust among voters

The impact of blockchain technology on the trustworthiness of online voting systems - an exploration of blockchain-enabled online voting

Online Voting evidently increases election turnouts. However, recent state-owned initiatives have failed due to security concerns and a lack of trust in the systems. Block chain seems to be a very suitable technical solution to establish transparency in online voting and thus, create trust. We have built our own, block chain-enabled voting platform and utilized it to run an A/B-testing experiment at an university election to investigate its effect. Our results which show that students trusted the block chain-based voting version less than the control version can be found in Vysna (2020). The following discussion can be found in Konzok (2020

A Framework for QKD-based Electronic Voting

This paper deals with the security aspect of electronic voting (e-voting) by introducing quantum key distribution (QKD) to the e-voting process. This can offer an extremely high level of security that can be very beneficial for some significant e-voting tasks. Moreover, a framework for the integration of the QKD with the e-voting system is proposed. The Helios voting system, which is considered as one of the open-source and major voting systems, has been chosen for this integration. Investigation of the main design aspects of building a QKD-based e-voting system has been done. Thus, the expected advantages and limitations of the proposal are discussed and analyzed

Role of shared identity and agency trust in online voting among Finnish citizens

This study examined the impact of shared identity and agency trust, governmental vs. third party, on Finnish citizens' intention to vote online. Using the integrated model of shared identity and trust as a theoretical lens, a within-subject quasi-experiment was conducted to understand the impact of agency trust on intention to vote online. The model was tested using data from 248 Finnish citizens using PLS-SEM. We found that citizens’ perceptions of shared identity with online voting agencies significantly contribute to agency trust. This trust in agencies, then directly and indirectly through perceived usefulness, affects online voting intention. Perceived usefulness directly and perceived ease of use indirectly increase the intention to vote online. However, the perceived usefulness of online voting is contingent upon the voting administering agency being the government. This study contributes to the understanding of agency trust in online voting adoption in the Finnish context and highlights the role of shared identity in building citizen trust in online voting. It also emphasizes the effect of voting agency type on the perceived usefulness of online voting