Abstract or Summary:
Authentication is an important part of the voting process, both for the voting system authenticating the human as a legitimate voter without sacrificing secret balloting, and for the voter authenticating the vote recorder. Voters want the capability to vote remotely, but this makes both directions of authentication more difficult. Human factors are a crucial part of the authentication process. In particular, the system for authenticating the vote recorder must be designed in a way that ensures the human cannot be easily tricked into trusting an illegitimate recorder and so that the voter has confidence in the integrity of the voting process. In this paper, we discuss some of the issues associated with Internet-based remote voting and argue that visual cryptography offers a promising way to provide both satisfactory authentication and secret ballot guarantees.