User testing and trustworthy electronic voting system design

In this contribution the user interface design for trustworthy system is presented. The principle of the Electronic Voting is discussed. The research aim was to discuss a users trust and its issues, which are connected to the design process of the prototype electronic voting system

Explanation and trust: what to tell the user in security and AI?

There is a common problem in artificial intelligence (AI) and information security. In AI, an expert system needs to be able to justify and explain a decision to the user. In information security, experts need to be able to explain to the public why a system is secure. In both cases, the goal of explanation is to acquire or maintain the users' trust. In this paper, we investigate the relation between explanation and trust in the context of computing science. This analysis draws on literature study and concept analysis, using elements from system theory as well as actor-network theory. We apply the conceptual framework to both AI and information security, and show the benefit of the framework for both fields by means of examples. The main focus is on expert systems (AI) and electronic voting systems (security). Finally, we discuss consequences of our analysis for ethics in terms of (un)informed consent and dissent, and the associated division of responsibilities

Secure and Verifiable Electronic Voting in Practice: the use of vVote in the Victorian State Election

The November 2014 Australian State of Victoria election was the first statutory political election worldwide at State level which deployed an end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system in polling places. This was the first time blind voters have been able to cast a fully secret ballot in a verifiable way, and the first time a verifiable voting system has been used to collect remote votes in a political election. The code is open source, and the output from the election is verifiable. The system took 1121 votes from these particular groups, an increase on 2010 and with fewer polling places

The SAVE System: Secure Architecture for Voting Electronically: Existing Technology, with Built-in Redundancy, Enables Reliability

Existing technology is capable of yielding secure, reliable, and auditable voting systems. This system outlines an architecture based on redundancy at each stage of the ballot submission process that is resistant to external hacking and internal insertion of malicious code. The proposed architecture addresses all layers of the system beyond the point when a voter commits the ballot. These steps include the verification of eligibility to vote, authentication, and aggregation of the vote. A redundant electronic audit trail keeps track of all of the votes and messages received, rendering a physical paper trail unnecessary. There is no single point of failure in the system, as none of the components at a particular layer relies on any of the others; nor is there a single component that decides what tally is correct. Each system arrives at the result on its own. Programming time for implementation is minimal. The proposed architecture was written in Java in a short time. A second programmer was able to write a module in less than a week. Performance and reliability are incrementally improvable by separate programmers writing new redundant modules

Implementation and Evaluation of Steganography based Online Voting

Though there are online voting systems available, the authors propose a new and secure steganography based E2E (end-to-end) verifiable online voting system, to tackle the problems in voting process. This research implements a novel approach to online voting by combining visual cryptography with image steganography to enhance system security without degrading system usability and performance. The voting system will also include password hashed-based scheme and threshold decryption scheme. The software is developed on web-based Java EE with the integration of MySQL database server and Glassfish as its application server. The authors assume that the election server used and the election authorities are trustworthy. A questionnaire survey of 30 representative participants was done to collect data to measure the user acceptance of the software developed through usability testing and user acceptance testing

Usable Verifiable Secrecy-Preserving E-Voting

In this paper we propose the usage of QR-Codes to enable usable veriable e-voting schemes based on code voting. The idea { from a voter\u27s perspective { is to combine code voting proposed by Chaum with the cast-as-intended verication mechanism used e.g. in Switzerland (using a personal initialization code, return codes per option, a conrmation code and a nalisation code); while all codes to be entered into the e-voting system by voters are available as QR-Code (i.e. one personalised QR voting code per voting option and one personal conrmation QR-Code). We conduct a user study to evaluate the usability and user experience of such an approach: both the code sheets and the election webpage are based on usability research in this area but adopted for our idea. As our proposal performs good wrt. usability, we discuss how such usable front-ends enable more secure e-voting systems in respect to end-to-end veriability and vote secrecy