RemoteVote and SAFE Vote: Towards Usable End-to-End Verification for Vote-by-Mail
This work addresses the growing use of postal voting, with 43% of U.S. voters casting ballots by mail in 2020, by proposing usable E2E-V solutions for vote-by-mail, which is an incremental advancement over the limited prior research.
The paper tackles the problem of extending end-to-end verifiable (E2E-V) election schemes to vote-by-mail contexts, presenting RemoteVote and SAFE Vote as approaches that allow mail-in voters to benefit from E2E-V without altering the experience for non-participants, and evaluates them against the existing STROBE framework with an expansive set of properties including usability and verifiability.
Postal voting is growing rapidly in the U.S., with 43% of voters casting ballots by mail in 2020, yet until recently there has been little research about extending the protections of end-to-end verifiable (E2E-V) election schemes to vote-by-mail contexts. The first - and to date, only - framework to focus on this setting is STROBE, which has important usability limitations. In this work, we present two approaches, RemoteVote and SAFE Vote, that allow mail-in voters to benefit from E2E-V without changing the voter experience for those who choose not to participate in verification. To evaluate these systems and compare them with STROBE, we consider an expansive set of properties, including novel attributes of usability and verifiability, several of which have applicability beyond vote-by-mail contexts. We hope that our work will help catalyze further progress towards universal applicability of E2E-V for real-world elections.