Increasing security without decreasing usability: A comparison of various verifiable voting systems

Abstract
Electronic voting researchers advocate for verifiable voting
schemes to maximise election integrity. In order to maximise
vote secrecy, so-called code-voting approaches were proposed.
Both verifiability and code voting require voters to expend
additional effort during vote casting. Verifiability has been
used in actual elections, but this is not the case for code
voting due to usability concerns. There is little evidence
from empirical studies attesting to its usability. Our main
contribution is to extend an existing verifiable voting system
(used for real world elections) with a code-voting approach
to improve the system’s security properties. We minimise
voter effort as corresponding QR codes are scanned instead
of requiring manual code entry. We conducted a user study
to evaluate the general usability of this proposal as well as
its manipulation-detection efficacy. In particular, we found
that extending the considered verifiable voting systems with
code-voting approaches to enhance vote secrecy is feasible
because we could not observe a significant decrease in general
usability while manipulation detection improved significantly