A Synthesis of Vote Verification Methods in Electronic Voting Systems

Voting Requirements

Several countries (e.g., the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC) Voting Systems Standard (VSS) (Federal Election Commission, 2002, 2005), Council of Europe (Council of Europe, 2004) and various researchers, e.g., (Volkamer, 2009; Antonyan et al., 2009), have defined requirements for voting systems and machines. These works contain a set of principles to ensure compliance with the principles of voting and, in many cases, with the local laws. These documents can also be classified according to the context in which the requirements are to be developed (e.g., paper-based voting or e-voting), the type of e-voting system addressed (e.g., DRE-based versus optical scan-based), the categories in which the requirements are classified, and the level of detail for the requirements. Some of the requirements, like: verifiability, integrity, privacy usability and accessibility, are related to the vote verification process. In the following, a brief description about these requirements is provided.