Introducing Precautionary Behavior by Temporal Diversion of Voter Attention from Casting to Verifying their Vote

Most electronic voting systems in use today provide printouts so called voter verifiable paper audit trails (VVPATs). Voters are supposed to verify these before they put them into the ballot box in order to detect election fraud. A number of studies have shown that voters are unlikely to do so when using current systems. Thus, it is very likely that malicious electronic voting systems print the wrong candidates without being detected. We introduce precautionary behavior by providing voters with “just in time” instructions while ensuring that these instructions cannot be manipulated by a malicious electronic voting system. Our approach is evaluated in a user study, showing a highly significant increase in the number of voters that verify, as they found the manipulation we introduced in the printouts for the study.