Intelligo ut Confido: Understanding, Trust and User Experience in Verifiable Receipt-Free E-Voting (long version)

TL;DR

This paper evaluates voter experience and trust in receipt-freeness mechanisms within an e-voting protocol, highlighting usability challenges and the link between understanding and trust through a user study involving 300 participants.

Contribution

It provides the first user study on vote-buying in e-voting, assessing usability, trust, and understanding of receipt-freeness procedures in the Selene protocol.

Findings

Usability and trust factors were rated low by participants.

A positive correlation exists between trust and understanding.

The study offers insights into voter perceptions of receipt-freeness mechanisms.

Abstract

Voting protocols seek to provide integrity and vote privacy in elections. To achieve integrity, procedures have been proposed allowing voters to verify their vote - however this impacts both the user experience and privacy. Especially, vote verification can lead to vote-buying or coercion, if an attacker can obtain documentation, i.e. a receipt, of the cast vote. Thus, some voting protocols go further and provide mechanisms to prevent such receipts. To be effective, this so-called receipt-freeness depends on voters being able to understand and use these mechanisms. In this paper, we present a study with 300 participants which aims to evaluate the voters' experience of the receipt-freeness procedures in the e-voting protocol Selene in the context of vote-buying. This actually constitutes the first user study dealing with vote-buying in e-voting. While the usability and trust factors were rated low in the experiments, we found a positive correlation between trust and understanding.