A Holistic Framework for the Evaluation of Internet Voting Systems

Abstract

The foundations of democratic societies are elections. Due to their central importance to society, elections are bound to high legal standards, which are usually specified as election principles in national constitutions. To date, technological advance has reached elections, and Internet voting is a buzzword in the field of information technology. Many Internet voting systems and schemes have been proposed in research and some have even been used in legally binding elections. However, their underlying requirements are on the one hand often too closely linked to the specific technology and on the other hand mostly tailored to the scheme/system under investigation and therefore not connectable with election principles. This makes it difficult to compare different schemes/systems with each other, and correspondingly, it is difficult for election officials to select one of the proposed Internet voting schemes/systems for their own election setting. This chapter counters this artifact with two contributions, which are captured within an evaluation framework. First, based on the interdisciplinary method KORA, the authors derive constitutionally founded technical requirements. Second, they propose metrics to estimate the fulfillment of these requirements within concrete Internet voting systems. Given these contributions, the framework developed within this chapter supports election officials in making justified decisions about the selection and deployment of a specific Internet voting scheme/system.