Implementing and evaluating a software-independent voting system for polling station elections

In 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court introduced the principle of “public nature of elections” (Federal Constitutional Court of Germany, March 2009). This principle requires that when using electronic voting systems it must be possible for the citizen to verify the essential steps in the election process and in the ascertainment of the results reliably and without special expert knowledge. Unfortunately, none of the existing systems complies with this principle. As a result, the use of electronic voting systems in Germany for parliamentary elections has stopped. Nevertheless, electronic voting systems are necessary and would improve the situation, especially for elections with complex ballots and voting rules, for example some local elections in Germany or parliamentary elections in Belgium and Luxembourg. The concept proposed by Volkamer et al. (Volkamer et al., 2011) was analyzed by a legal expert and evaluated to comply with the German legal requirements for local elections in the state of Hesse (Henning et al., 2012). In this paper we specify and concretize processes that were left open in the concept, and implement a prototype. We evaluated this prototype in a user study that was conducted alongside the university elections at the Technische Universtität Darmstadt in June 2013. The results of the study show that most of the participants were satisfied with the prototype and would support its use for the upcoming university elections. We also report some lessons learned.