An Active Approach to Voting Verification

Abstract

As our voting systems have come to rely more deeply on computer technology there have been great opportunities to improve the voting process, however, recently computer scientists and the general public have become wary of the amount of trust we place in the computers running our elections. Many proposals for audit systems to monitor our elections have been created. One popular audit system is the voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). Another more recent proposal is the voter verified audio audit transcript trail (VVAATT). In order to compare these two systems we conducted a user study where we purposely added errors to the audit trail in order to see if voters would be able to find these errors. Our results showed that voters found many more errors using the VVAATT system than they did with the VVPAT system.