Abstract
In this paper we discuss on the general level the issue of trust the voters put in the secret voting system used in political elections. We promote the point of view that the voters’ recognition and acceptance of a particular voting system should be based not on trust, but on knowledge—on the knowledge of what is really happening during the voting, not presumed. The starting point of knowledge is mistrust. We formulate a postulate of mistrust (of an election commission) and keeping it in mind look closely at several deployed voting systems including the Estonian one. We find all of them unacceptable. Then we formulate three criteria for an Internet voting system to be acceptable to the voters (civil society). These are (1) openness, (2) acceptance of the system by an uncertain and broad set of qualified examiners and (3) a verifiable access of unsophisticated voters to the voter’s software approved by the aforementioned set of examiners. Finally, we explain only the modest role of the official (government) certification of the voting system in its recognition by the voters (civil society).
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Notes
- 1.
The Internet voting has been used in Estonia nine times since 2005. For example, during parliamentary elections in 2007, 2011 and 2015 share of voters who voted over the Internet was 5.5%, 24.3% and 30.5% [6].
- 2.
According to Microsoft, there were 350 thousand professional software developers at the end of 2010, and this figure grows by 20 thousand annually. This estimation is based on the number of licenses for developer’s software sold in Russia. Microsoft also estimated number of non-professional software developers at 850 thousand people [7].
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Khamitov, I.M., Dostov, V., Shoust, P. (2019). Secret Voting: Knowledge vs Trust. In: Misra, S., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11620. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_46
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24296-1_46
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