German Voters’ Attitudes Towards Voting Online with a Verifiable System

Abstract

A representative study came to the conclusion that more than 63% of German voters would have like to cast their vote for the federal election in 2021 online. In this paper, we aimed to investigate why Germans might be in favour or against online voting, conducting a online survey. We furthermore aimed to study the reactions of people being in favor of online voting if confronted with a verifiable remote voting system, as well as with interventions aimed at communicating that it is important to follow all the steps to verify. Our findings show that the majority of our participants were generally willing to vote online. Convenience emerged as the most popular reason for voting online. The reaction to the verifiable remote voting system was diverse, from our participants being irritated from the complexity, to very positive reactions due to high security level. Nonetheless, the majority of the participants did not change their willingness to vote online after seeing the proposed system. The different interventions had no effect. Furthermore, the majority agreed on the importance of verifiability being in place.