Diffusion of Voter Responsibility: Potential Failings in E2E Voter Receipt Checking

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Presented at Jets 2015 by

Jeremy Clark

Aleksander Essex

Ester Moher

End-to-end verifiable (E2E) voting systems provide voters with (privacy preserving) receipts of their ballots allowing them to check that their votes were correctly included in the final tally. A number of recent studies and field tests have examined the usability of ballot casting and receipt checking. Simply checking receipts, however, is not enough to provide strong assurance that the election outcome is correct; voters must also be counted on to report any discrepancies between their receipts and the official record when they occur. In this paper we designed and ran a study examining the frequency and conditions under which voters (a) check their receipts, and (b) report discrepancies when they occur. Participants were recruited online and were asked to vote in a survey on charitable giving. Similar to previous work, we found that the proportion of voters performing a receipt check was low.