A Consideration of Voting Accessibility for

Injured OIF/OEF Service Members: Needs

Assessment

July 2012

Contract E4064914

2010 Voting Technology and Accessibility Research – Military Heroes Initiative 

CFDA #90.403

PREPARED FOR:

Election Assistance Commission 

1201 New York Avenue, N.W. 

Suite 300

Washington, D.C. 20005

PREPARED BY:

Human Systems Integration Division 

Electronic Systems Laboratory 

Georgia Tech Research Institute 

Georgia Institute of Technology 

Atlanta, Georgia 30332
Annotated Literature Review Results

Remote & Absentee Voting

Hoke, C. (2009). Internet voting: Structural governance principles for election cyber security in 

democratic nations. Paper presented at the Second International Symposium on Global Information 

Governance, Prague, Czech Republic.

Internet voting may become more common in the near future, and associated security concerns 

will play a role in technology acceptance. Worldwide, governments often disregard opinions of 

computer security experts on the matter. The Internet provides little assurance of Data Security 

and integrity, and the transmission of information is susceptible to various attacks.

The authors recommend that the each government appoint a policy board, whose members 

have the necessary technical expertise, and whose decisions are transparent to the public, to 

ensure end-to-end auditability of Internet voting technology. Rather than relying on a set of 

technical standards to be met, the policy board should assess proposals for internet voting 

systems on a case by case basis. Finally, democratic nations should notify each other of threats 

and attacks.

Krimmer, R., Triessnig, S., & Volkamer, M. (2007). The development of remote e-voting around the world: 

A review of roads and directions. Paper presented at The International Conference on E-voting and 

Identity, Bochum, Germany.

Despite technological capabilities, governments have been slow to adopt remote electronic 

voting via the Internet. The authors surveyed 104 internet elections held worldwide. They found 

that documentation of security and privacy issues were scarce in these elections. Before 

Internet voting can become widespread, a great deal of research and documentation needs to 

be accomplished. Future studies should compare the effectiveness of various methods to ensure 

accurate voter verification, anonymity, system usability, and cost. A potential untapped data 

source is internet elections held in private organizations – a domain in which internet voting is 

much more common.

Popoveniuc, S. & Lundin, D. (2007). A simple technique for safely using punchscan and Pret a Voter in 

mail-in-elections. Paper presented at The International Conference on E-voting and Identity, Bochum, 

Germany.

Traditional mail-in absentee ballots can be difficult to audit, use, and understand, and they do 

not ensure anonymity. This paper reviews the security of two mail-in systems –Punchscan and 

Pret a Voter – and discusses the novel system that overcomes their deficiencies. The proposed 

system employs unique serial numbers on each ballot, in combination with randomized letters 

associated with each choice on the ballot. Following the election, the serial number and letters 

from each ballot are published on the Internet. Voters can check their record against the 

published record to determine whether their vote was cast as intended.

Puiggali, J. & Morales-Rocha, V. (2007). Remote voting schemes: A comparative analysis. Paper 

presented at The International Conference on E-voting and Identity, Bochum, Germany.
Remote electronic voting via fax, e-mail, and the Internet can provide greater reliability than 

traditional mail-in ballots, which can be lost or delayed in the mail. Key considerations for the 

comparative evaluation of these methods including security (e.g., privacy and auditability), 

usability, intellect and management (e.g., vote counting). Although the public retains a general 

concern that internet voting is not secure, the present heuristic evaluation concluded that the 

risks associated with Internet voting are not more numerous than those associated with other 

forms of remote electronic voting, and many safeguards can mitigate the risks.

Qadah, G. Z. & Taha, R. (2007). Electronic voting systems: Requirements, design, and implementation.

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 29, 376-386.

Remote electronic voting technology provides the possibility of lowering costs, increasing 

participation, and improving the accuracy of election results. This paper discusses design 

requirements and implementation of a remote electronic voting system, which enables voters 

to cast votes anytime and anywhere using personal computers, personal digital assistants, and 

cell phones. The voting system does not require the generation of content that is specific to 

each type of device. Instead, versatile technology such as extensible markup language can be 

used to represent the data content and style sheets, which can customize the ballot 

presentation for different connecting devices.

Reinhard, K. & Jung, W. (2007). Compliance of POLYAS with the BSI protection profile - Basic 

requirements for remote electronic voting systems. Paper presented at The International Conference on 

E-voting and Identity, Bochum, Germany.

In the past year and a half a group of experts in electronic voting developed a Common Criteria 

Protection Profile describing basic requirements for remote electronic voting systems. This work 

was lead managed by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the German 

Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and initiated by the German Gesellschaft fur 

Informatik (GI - society for informatics). To complete this work Micromata’s POLYAS system, 

which is used for the GI elections needs to be evaluated against this Protection Profile. As a first 

step a high-level evaluation based on the security objectives has been carried out. The results 

are presented in this paper.