Building voting systems for secret ballot elections has many challenges and is the subject of significant academic research efforts. These challenges come from conflicting requirements. In this paper, we introduce a novel architectural approach to voting system construction that may help satisfy conflicting requirements and increase voter satisfaction. Our design, called Open Voting Client Architecture, defines a voting system architectural approach that can harness the power of individualized voting clients. In this work, we contribute a voting system reference architecture to depict the current voting system construction and then use it to define Open Voting Client Architecture. We then detail a specific implementation called Op-Ed Voting to evaluate the security of Open Voting Client Architecture systems. We show that Op-Ed Voting, using voters\u27 personal devices in an end-to-end verifiable protocol, can potentially improve usability and accessibility for voters while also satisfying security requirements for electronic voting
