Evaluating the Usability of E-Voting Technologies

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2009

The arrival of electronic voting has generated considerable controversy, mostly about its vulnerability to fraud. By comparison, virtually no attention has been given to its usability, i.e., voters' ability to vote as they intend, which was central to the controversy surrounding the 2000 US presidential election. Yet it is hard to imagine a domain of human-computer interaction where usability has more impact on how democracy works. This article reports a laboratory investigation of the usability of six electronic voting systems chosen to represent the features of systems in current use and potentially in future use. The primary question was whether e-voting systems are sufficiently hard to use that voting accuracy and satisfaction are compromised. We observed that voters often seemed quite lost taking far more than the required number of actions to cast individual votes, especially when they ultimately voted inaccurately. Their satisfaction went down as their effort went up. And accuracy with some systems was disturbingly low. While many of these problems are easy to fix, manufacturers will need to adopt usability engineering practices that have vastly improved user interfaces throughout the software industry.

2003

A secure PKI based system for e-voting was developed. We tested the application, several organizational aspects, and usability in fourteen field trials. In this paper we describe the method and findings. What do we learn about turnout, about the logistics of organizing evoting, and about usability and reliability of the system in practice?

Elections and voting are fundamental to any consensus-based society. They are one of the most critical functions of democracy. There are a number of voting systems adopted all over the world with each of them having its peculiar problems. The manual voting system still appears prominent among the developed and developing nations, but with considerations being given to an electronic alternative with a view to showing most of the short comings. Furthermore, with the increased interest and attention on e-government, e-democracy and e-governance, e-voting initiatives have gained more significance. Thus, many countries are piloting with various e-voting models and systems in order to enable voting from anywhere; also, international organisations are developing standards and recommendations in this area. This paper details a review of the underlying concepts of e-voting and discusses some of the salient issues on the subject. Also, a review of common e-voting models, existing elections schemes and explanation of the usual terminologies associated with e-voting were presented.

Currently, rather secure cryptographic voting protocols providing verifiability exist. However, without adequate usability and abstraction concepts to explain the voting process and, in particular, the verifiability steps, they are not ready for legally binding elections. This holds in particular for remote electronic voting systems because of the absence of poll workers who can support voters by explaining single steps. In this paper, the usability of the ballot casting and verifiability procedures of the Helios open source end to end verifiable remote electronic voting system is analyzed using the cognitive walkthrough approach by security, electronic voting and usability experts. We demonstrate the need for improvements to the usability and verifiability of Helios, before it is used in large scale elections outside of an academic context. Based on our results, we propose new interfaces for improved usability of Helios and future end to end verifiable electronic voting systems.

American Politics Research, 2008

Electronic voting systems were developed, in part, to make voting easier and to boost voters' confidence in the election process. Using three new approaches to studying electronic voting systems-focusing on a large-scale field study of the usability of a representative set of systems-we demonstrate that voters view these systems favorably but that design differences have a substantial impact on voters' satisfaction with the voting process and on the need to request help. Factors associated with the digital divide played only a small role with respect to overall satisfaction but they were strongly associated with feeling the need for help. Results suggest numerous possible improvements in electronic voting systems as well as the need for continued analysis that assesses specific characteristics of both optical scan and direct recording electronic systems.

2014 6th International Conference on Electronic Voting: Verifying the Vote (EVOTE), 2014

We present the initial set of findings from a pilot experiment that used an Internet-based end-toend verifiable e-voting system and was held during the European Elections 2014 in Athens, Greece. During the experiment, which took place on May 25th 2014, 747 people voted with our system in special voting stations that were placed outside two main polling places in Athens, Greece. The election mimicked the actual election that was taking place which included a great number of parties. After casting their ballot, voters were invited to complete online a post-election questionnaire that probed their attitudes towards e-voting. In total, 648 questionnaires were collected. We present a description of the experiment and a regression analysis of our results. Our results suggest that acceptance of the e-voting system was particularly high especially among the most educated, the technologically adept but also-somewhat surprisingly-older generations.

This paper examines the various different types of electronic voting systems, and distinguishes between electronic machine voting and electronic distance voting. The prospects of electronic voting systems are unclear; this paper observes some of the risks and the costs that are associated with electronic voting systems. This paper discusses security requirements when using information communications technologies in an electronic voting system. This paper uses computer security requirements to develop a voter trust model that helps to identify weaknesses in electronic voting systems. This paper observes the security threats that may affect an electronic voting system and that can compromise such a system. Diebold's electronic voting systems highlight security concerns of electronic voting. To develop electronic voting system governments must make considerations regarding the system and its characteristics, as these will inevitably affect its future.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2013

Voting is a fundamental decision making instrument in any consensus-based society and democracy depends on the proper administration of popular elections. In any election, there exists a set of requirements among which voters should receive assurance that their intent was correctly captured and that all eligible votes were correctly tallied. On the other hand, the election system as a whole should ensure that voter coercion is unlikely. These conflicting requirements present a significant challenge: how can voters receive enough assurance to trust the election result, but not so much that they can prove to a potential coercer how they voted.

This paper hopefully contributes to the discussion on what kind of electronic voting systems utilizing Internet technology we should be aiming at and what characteristics these systems should have. It provides an overview of the major constitutional and legal aspects of e-voting, together with their technical implications. It also discusses the security requirements and the system-wide properties that the voting protocol of an electronic voting system is expected to fulfill. An overview of families of existing voting protocols, together with a brief analysis of their characteristics, is provided. The aim is to investigate and discuss the extent to which current voting protocols comply with the identified requirements.

International Journal of Information Engineering and Electronic Business, 2020

The voting system in the world has been characterised with many fundamental challenges, thereby resulting to a corrupt contestant winning an election. Researchers have been emotionally, physically, socially and intellectually concerned about the election malpractices recorded at various levels of electing a representative. Questions on how corrupt stakeholders in elections could be prevented from fraudulent activities such as rigging and impersonation called for discussion and answers. Consequences of declaring a corrupt contestant as a winner are bad governance, insecurities and diversification of public funds for personal gains. There must be approaches to tackle the problems of voting systems. This paper focused on a comprehensive review of electronic voting systems by different scholars as a platform for identifying shortcomings or drawbacks towards the implementation of a highly secured electronic voting system. The methods used by different scholars were technically reviewed so as to identify areas that need improvement towards providing solutions to the identified problems. Furthermore, countries with history on the adoption of e-voting systems were reviewed. Based on the problems identified from various works, a novel for future work on developing a secured electronic voting system using fingerprint and visual semagram techniques was proposed.

EAI endorsed transactions on smart cities, 2024

EIIC 2014. The 3rd Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference, Proceedings in Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference, eds. M. Mokrys, S. Badura, A. Lieskovsky, EDIS – Publishing Institution of the University of Zilina, Slovakia, ss. 311-315, ISSN 978-80-554-0921-4., 2014

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) constitute a crucial element of globalisation and computerization processes. ICT are not exclusively present in the economy, entertainment, trade or banking, but they are also used in politics or social area. Public institutions employ ICT (particularly the Internet) for informational and educational purposes as well as for improving the efficiency of state institutions and bodies. With the availability of new (apart from traditional) forms of participation, such as e.g. electronic community consultations, electronic people's initiatives, participatory budgeting, e-voting, the citizens are offered the possibility to increase their activity on the political scene and their real influence on the decision-making process. It’s due to the fact that modern technologies can improve the interactions occurring between voters and political institutions, political parties, or politicians. One of such interaction is the process of voting, which in some countries is supported by ICT (e-voting). This article aims primarily at providing answers for questions: about the most important problems connected with introduction of this more and more popular way of civic participation in politics and with the use of e-voting in general elections, as well as about the most crucial and most frequent uncertainties that e-voting implies.

The Political Quarterly, 2014

Electronic voting entered the political arena some years ago, with some countries advocating its use, some countries trialling and then abandoning it and yet others preferring to preserve the status quo of paper-and-pencil voting within a voting booth. In this paper we present the pros and cons of electronic voting and propose a set of characteristics we think electronic voting systems should exhibit. We then briefly review some pertinent concerns, issues and worries. We conclude by introducing the Handivote system, an electronic voting system that supports voting by means of SMS messaging, and explain how it measures up in terms of our own specified characteristics.

2006

This document provides a general description of the telematic voting scenario designed by the author's research group. This scenario reinforces verification procedures as key elements to achieve full acceptance of the system on the part of voters. To frame this work, a general overview of electronic voting is given and the conditions entailed by these systems are specified.