Measures to establish trust in internet voting

Abstract

Technical research has achieved strong advances in addressing security concerns in internet voting, yet the solutions are complicated and difficult to explain to the public. Accordingly, internet voting commonly faces opposition despite the benefits voters and authorities may expect. It appears that security features are only one premise underlying a system's acceptance among the electorate. The other challenge is to exploit these features at establishing the required trust among the public. In this paper we introduce a number of measures meant to help at gaining trust. We hereby emphasize the importance of taking the exposition of a system's security features and the remaining risks as the foundation of any strategy. After describing the proposed measures and discussing both their advantages and pitfalls, we relate them to four commonly known applied internet voting systems.