While online services emerge in all areas of life, the voting procedure in
many democracies remains paper-based as the security of current online voting
technology is highly disputed. We address the issue of trustworthy online
voting protocols and recall therefore their security concepts with its trust
assumptions. Inspired by the Bitcoin protocol, the prospects of distributed
online voting protocols are analysed. No trusted authority is assumed to ensure
ballot secrecy. Further, the integrity of the voting is enforced by all voters
themselves and without a weakest link, the protocol becomes more robust. We
introduce a taxonomy of notions of distribution in online voting protocols that
we apply on selected online voting protocols. Accordingly, blockchain-based
protocols seem to be promising for online voting due to their similarity with
paper-based protocols
