Poster: Usable Verifiable Remote Electronic Voting - Usability Analysis of the Helios System

Internet voting has for many years attracted the attention of the general public, election officials and security researchers. However, only very few remote internet voting systems have been used in actual elections. Those election officials that enabled remote electronic voting rarely use voting protocols proposed by the security and cryptography community, instead opting for black box systems that need to be trusted as it is not possible for the public to verify the election in any terms. On the research side there already exist very promising end to end verifiable voting schemes (that incorporate both individual and universal verifiability), like Helios and Civitas. From a cryptographic perspective the main challenge is to find an appropriate balance between verifiability, anonymity and coercion resistance while ideally ensuring all three to a particular extent. The usability and practicability of these schemes has in the past been neglected. Many protocols are too complex for average voters to interact with or even understand the underlying concepts. As a result of this, voters will neither accept such systems nor opt to verify their votes. This would also mean that the system then is not much more secure than an easy-to-use black box system. In our research we focus on making verifiable remote e-voting systems user friendly and practical. We focus on the Helios voting system as it is the only one that has been implemented including user interfaces. In previous work [4], we conducted a usability analysis of Helios version 3.0 based on the cognitive walkthrough approach while focusing on vote casting and the individual verifiability. Based on the findings we proposed new interfaces. We recently conducted a lab study on these improved interfaces. In this abstract we describe the result of the cognitive walkthrough in terms of the improved interfaces and processes. We also propose the setup of the lab study and a first overview of the expected results. Results will be presented in greater detail during the oral poster presentation.