Internet voting maturity framework — quantifying maturity in internet voting protocols

Abstract

Voting is a cornerstone of collective participatory decision-making in contexts ranging from political elections to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Despite the proliferation of internet voting protocols promising enhanced accessibility and efficiency, their evaluation and comparison are complicated by a lack of standardized criteria and unified definitions of security and maturity. Furthermore, socio-technical requirements by decision makers are not structurally taken into consideration when comparing internet voting systems. This article addresses this gap by introducing a trust-centric maturity scoring framework to quantify the security and maturity of 17 internet voting systems. A comprehensive trust model analysis is conducted for selected internet voting protocols, examining their security properties, trust assumptions, technical complexity, and practical usability. In this article, we propose the Internet Voting Maturity Framework (IVMF) which supports nuanced assessment that reflects real-world deployment concerns and aids decision-makers in selecting appropriate systems tailored to their specific use case requirements. The framework is general enough to be applied to other systems, where the aspects of decentralization, trust, and security are crucial, such as digital identity, Ethereum layer-two scaling solutions, and federated data infrastructures. Its objective is to provide an extendable toolkit for policymakers and technology experts alike that normalizes technical and non-technical requirements on a univariate scale.