Summative Usability Assessments of STAR-Vote: A Cryptographically Secure e2e Voting System That Has Been Empirically Proven to Be Easy to Use

Background: From the project's inception, STAR-Vote was intended to be one of the first usable, end-to-end (e2e) voting systems with sophisticated security. To realize STAR-Vote, computer security experts, statistical auditors, human factors (HF)/human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers, and election officials collaborated throughout the project and relied upon a user-centered, iterative design and development process, which included human factors research and usability testing, to make certain the system would be both usable and secure. Objective: While best practices in HF/HCI methods for design were used and all apparent usability problems were identified and fixed, summative system usability assessments were conducted toward the end of the user-centered design process to determine whether STAR-Vote is in fact easy to use. Method and Results: After collecting efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction measurements per ISO 9241-11's system usability criteria, an analysis of the data revealed that there is evidence for STAR-Vote being the most usable, cryptographically secure voting system to date when compared with the previously tested e2e systems: Helios, Pret a Voter, and Scantegrity. Conclusion and Application: STAR-Vote being one of the first e2e voting systems that is both highly usable and secure is a significant accomplishment, because tamper-resistant voting systems can be used in U.S. elections to ensure the integrity of the electoral process, while still ensuring that voter intent is accurately reflected in the cast ballots. Moreover, this research empirically shows that a complex, secure system can still be usable-meaning that implemented security is not an excuse for poor usability.