How Trust Is Gained and Lost Voting Technologies and Trust

E nsuring public trust in election results has been a concern since antiquity. The Greeks carried out senatorial elections not by a simple showing of hands but by issuing little clay balls to the senators, who then cast their votes by dropping them into the appropriate pot. Paper ballots were first used by the Ro-mans; voting forms bearing the candidates' pre-printed names were introduced in Australia almost 150 years ago. The earliest voting machines date back a little more than 100 years, and various types of voting and vote-counting machines have been used extensively, particularly in the US. Douglas Jones offers a helpful voting-system history in " A Brief Illustrated History of Voting " available at Recent cryptographic voting schemes, such as David Chaum's, 1 VoteHere (www.votehere.com), and Prêt à Voter 2,3 provide strong security and privacy guarantees, high levels of transparency, and require only a minimum amount of public trust in voting devices or voting officials. In these schemes, voter verifiability assures accuracy and preserves ballot secrecy by allowing voters to verify that their votes are accurately counted. However, a full appreciation of such cryptographic voting schemes—on which an entire election's validity would depend— requires a high degree of mathematical sophistication; experts' evaluations and assurances might not be enough to persuade the public to put their trust in such schemes. Our ultimate goal is an e-voting system that isn't only completely trustworthy—doesn't lose, add, or alter ballots, for example, or violate ballot secrecy 4 —but is also trusted by voters to have these properties. As a step toward this goal, we have aimed to develop voting systems that provide strong security, privacy, and accuracy via noncryptographic means, yet retain the levels of public trust and understanding achieved by existing manual voting systems. Given this goal, our approach to our voting systems' design has of necessity been as much sociotechnical as technical in that we have deliberately tried—in pursuit of user acceptance and trust—to retain the familiarity and simplicity of currently well-accepted devices and voting processes. As a result, our proposed voting systems retain some paper use and try to avoid, or at least minimize, using electronics and computers. We believe that our proposed voting systems, which we term scratch-card voting systems, stand a good chance of retaining the trust level that the UK's present-day manual voting system enjoys, while providing increased security and voter verifiability—voters can confirm that their …