Internet Voting: Do people accept it? Do they trust it?

The widespread diffusion of the Internet and its use in everyday life has drawn attention to its possible use as an infrastructure for the implementation of voting systems. For such systems to be accepted by a large user community, they should not only guarantee the typical properties of traditional voting systems, i.e., voters’ anonymity and vote secrecy, but also offer additional advantages that could favor their acceptance. For example, they could provide for location independent voting, where users can vote from any location, possibly from their own home. Other advantages are the possibility for individual voters to verify that their votes has been tallied correctly, and the possibility for quick result computation. An even major advantage is the chance such systems offer to realize a form of direct democracy where all citizens may express their opinion, thus helping their representatives to better interpret their wishes. This opportunity might draw the citizens’ attention back to the political arena from where it has been moving away more and more, as low general election turn outs show all around the world. Anonymity, secrecy and democracy, i.e., the correct authentication of eligible voters, are achieved by means of sophisticated cryptographic algorithms that allow to protect votes from indiscreet eyes, to verify users’ identity and eligibility, and to decouple votes from who cast those votes. A variety of protocols satisfying all or a part of the above mentioned properties has been designed by the scientific community and some of them have also been implemented into commercial applications.