Bits or Paper? Comparing Remote Electronic Voting to Postal Voting

In the recent years it has often been discussed how elections can be conducted via the Internet. Many countries, including Germany, Estonia, Great Britain, Switzerland, USA or Austria have run tests of implementing e-Voting on different levels. Whilst offering e-Voting for public elections implies various legal problems, associations can allow for e-Voting in a relatively easy way. In this paper we investigate an election run by the leading German non governmental organization (NGO) in information technology – the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) – that provided for remote voting using postal voting and electronic voting via the Internet. It is a common requirement by election officials for remote e-Voting to be as secure as regular postal voting. To come up with an assessment the use of a criteria catalogue is best to compare these forms of voting.