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Contribution Details

Type Bachelor's Thesis
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Design and Implementation of Systems Interfaces for a Mixnet-based Voting System
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Raphael Wäspi
Supervisors
  • Burkhard Stiller
  • Christian Killer
  • Jan Von der Assen
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Faculty Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics
Date 2022
Abstract Text It is of central importance for a democracy that all citizens entitled to vote have the opportunity to cast their ballots in votes and elections. The most common way to vote in Switzerland is to hand in a completed ballot directly at the urn or by postal services. However, an important part of Switzerland's e-government strategy is to enable voting and elections electronically. In this context, the Federal Council emphasizes that e-voting should not only be made available to the Swiss abroad, but to all citizens who are entitled to vote. For this reason, a new legal basis has come into force on 25.05.2022, which allows the cantons to offer e-voting as part of a trial operation. Numerous challenges must be overcome in the development of the digitalization of voting and elections. While there is already a large amount of scientific literature on this topic, most of it takes a centralized approach. The Provotum project, on the other hand, takes a different approach. Due to the use of distributed ledger technology, this electronic voting and election system is decentralized. This has desirable consequences as it allows the system to ensure transparency, integrity and robustness. In the latest version of Provotum, established cryptographic techniques have been included in the project, resulting in the enabling of elections and the shifting of computational effort to the election infrastructure. However, this version does not yet use a graphical user interface. The thesis implements graphical user interfaces for vote casting and for vote administration. This means that relevant literature on user interfaces and user experiences in other electronic voting systems will also be examined, and the Provotum 3.0 Mixnet prototype will also be analyzed. Based on this analysis, three user interfaces will be created so that each stakeholder in Provotum can complete their tasks over the Internet. In addition, it creates a simple API that enables communication between the blockchain and the graphical user interfaces. These software components are implemented using modern technologies. Finally, user interfaces are evaluated using heuristics, use cases, a discussion and system usability scales.
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