Basic Requirements for a Fair Ballot System

"The goal of any voting system is to establish the intent of the voter, and transfer that intent to the vote counter."

- Bruce Schneier, Dec 2000 [ 14]

Requirements

By developing Mr. Schneier's statement, we can present four stages in voting systems.

• Establish who is "the voter"
• Establish the voter's intent
• Transfer the record of their intent to the vote counter
• Tabulate the result

These stages have a natural order. There is no point in establishing the intent of someone who is not authorised to vote, and we cannot count votes which have not yet been recorded. If each of these stages is to be carried out satisfactorily, certain requirements must be met.

Authenticate

We must begin by establishing who "the voter" is. In most democracies, voting is limited to a particular group (for example, citizens over 18 years of age), each of whom is entitled to vote once. To prevent personation¹, we must establish the identity of people attempting to vote. If someone is successfully identified as eligible we must record that they have been given their opportunity to vote and we must then give them that opportunity.

Establish Voter Intent

If we are to establish the voter's own intent, we must prevent voter coercion and verifiable vote sale. We protect the voter's privacy so that no-one else can verify whether they voted the way they were instructed. As stated above, the voter's identity must be recorded so that each voter can vote only once. Their vote, of course, must also be recorded. In order to prevent conflict between these two requirements we must record the vote and identity separately, while ensuring that a vote is only ever recorded for someone who has been successfully identified as eligible.

We must also ensure that the interface is adequately usable to give the voter a fair chance of recording their vote correctly. It is impossible to develop an interface which can never be misunderstood but there are heuristics available to the interface designer [15]. These include using designs already familiar to the user, and using metaphors which make the interface more intuitive.

Transfer the Vote

The vote must be transferred from the voter to the vote counter. It is important that the vote cannot be altered or removed at this stage, for obvious reasons.

Tabulate the Result

We use the word "tabulate" here, rather than "count" because count really doesn't convey the complexity of the task, especially for the Irish PR-STV system [13]. Apart from the obvious requirement that the votes be tabulated correctly, it is vital that the votes are seen to be tabulated correctly. A voting system is only as good as the public believe it to be. It must, therefore, be possible to independently re-tabulate the results. This last requirement also extends over all the other requirements. The public cannot be sure that the correct result was tabulated if they are not sure that, for example, all votes were recorded correctly.