Usable Verifiable Secrecy-Preserving E-Voting

In this paper we propose the usage of QR-Codes to enable usable verifiable e-voting schemes based on code voting. The idea – from a voter’s perspective – is to combine code voting proposed by Chaum with the cast-as-intended verification mechanism used e.g. in Switzerland (using a personal initialization code, return codes per option, a confirmation code and a finalisation code); while all codes to be entered into the e-voting system by voters are available as QR-Code (i.e. one personalised QR voting code per voting option and one personal confirmation QR-Code). We conduct a user study to evaluate the usability and user experience of such an approach: both the code sheets and the election webpage are based on usability research in this area but adopted for our idea. As our proposal performs good wrt. usability, we discuss how such usable front-ends enable more secure e-voting systems in respect to end-to-end verifiability and vote secrecy.