Verifiability in electronic voting - explanations for non security experts

Abstract

Scientists have requested verifiable electronic voting schemes for many years. These schemes offer individual and universal verifiability by applying and combining complex cryptographic primitives and protocols. Electronic voting systems in use provide less or even no verifiability. Thus election authorities and voters need to trust the provider and developer of the voting system regarding the integrity of the election. Due to arising critiques and the voting computer decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany, the future electronic voting systems will probably need to implement verifiability. Therefore, this paper presents an overview and analysis of approaches to implement verifiability. We mainly address non-security experts like the average election authority and the average voter. Thus, the paper supports election authorities in their decision making process for a verifiable electronic voting system and the voter in making use of the verifiability.