Usability Study of the Open Audit Voting System Helios – Course Project

helios

Usability Study of the Open Audit Voting System Helios (PDF)

The field of electronic voting has ventured into the area of elections that are publically auditable. A handful of open audit elections systems exist but very few of them have been critically looked at from the end user’s point of view. In our paper, we present a usability study of the web based open audit voting system Helios. By creating a mock student government election and observing the target voter’s behaviour, we have uncovered various usability issues and opinions regarding electronic voting. While the feedback was generally favourable for electronic voting, more than half of our participants would not have completed their vote. We explore the reasons behind these findings and provide a set of recommendations for the future of open audit voting systems.