Investigating Voter Perceptions of Printed Physical Audit Trails for Online Voting

Online elections come with security challenges since digital votes do not produce physical audit trails that are easily verifiable. We present and investigate a hybrid online voting system that combines the benefits of voting from home via the internet with those of physical ballots, such as risk-limiting audits and verifiability. After voting online, the system generates a tracking code and a physical printout – either paper or 3D-printed – of the encrypted vote that can be visually verified by the voters through live video-broadcasts. Through an online experiment (N=150), we compared hybrid voting with paper and 3D-printed votes to a baseline (digitally stored votes), investigating perceived trust, UX, usability, and security readiness. Among our results, we show that paper printouts enhance trust without negatively impacting UX. 3D-printouts enhance perceived privacy, yet impact usability and UX. We conclude with recommendations and practical considerations to inform the implementation of hybrid online voting schemes.