When organizational or corporate governance seeks to make a major decision, it may seek the opinions of its stakeholders and shareholders. This is done by allowing them to participate in votes. The reasons may vary from electing the board of directors to deciding whether to sell the company.
The vote may be conducted through various means, such as online voting, mail-in voting, or in-person voting. When making these decisions, everyone involved must have faith in the voting system used to administer the election.
A critical component of voter faith is the verifiability of the data and the votes throughout the process. One way to do this is by granting voters the ability to verify their votes.
End-to-end verification is another way of saying “from start to finish” in the voting process. However, the process is slightly different when discussing online and mail-in voting.
In both of these systems, the voter can verify who or what they voted for and that the vote was recorded. Both also use unique identifiers to track your ballot, similar to how you would track a FedEx package.
Where they differ is that with mail-in voting, the ballot is sent out with the unique identifier code attached to the ballot. This code can be removed by the voter for security and to ensure that no one else has access to the code. In online voting systems, the voter is able to see their unique identifier code when they log in for the first time. This code is usually encrypted using the latest security measures.
In the mail-in system, the user may visit a website for verification. A hotline may be used for those votes being conducted among older voters averse to technology.
In both systems, once logging in, the voter can access their records to see who and what they voted for, that the organization received the vote, and that the vote itself was added to the final vote tally. They should also see who certifies the election for additional transparency.
As we mentioned above, mail-in ballots have a removable code for security. The other reason the code is removable is for voter anonymity. Voter anonymity is critical to maintaining faith in the voting process.
A voter does not want to face the consequences or retaliation because someone found out who or what they voted for. Therefore, a vote can be verified and validated without tying the voter to the content of their vote.
Just as the mail-in system has removable unique identifiers, so does the online voting system; it's just done via different means, such as two-factor authentication and other encryption methods for cybersecurity.
End-to-end voter verification is a fantastic way to boost faith in an election system and encourage more people to vote instead of sitting on the sidelines. By being able to self-verify that each vote has been counted and, more importantly, counted correctly, the overall confidence in the electoral process increases.
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