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Next: Flexibility Up: Evaluation Previous: Verifiability

Convenience

Sensus satisfies the convenience property well, allowing voters to cast their votes quickly, in one session, and with minimal equipment, or special skills. In mock elections voters were able to mark their ballots, perform all necessary cryptographic functions, and complete all Sensus transactions within a few minutes -- an amount of time mock election participants found acceptable. A more efficient implementation of modular arithmetic and other functions would likely reduce this time to one or two minutes. Although, the computer science students and professors who participated in mock elections found Sensus easy to use, incorporating the Sensus user interface with a World Wide Web browser would make Sensus more accessible to less computer literate people.

Although Sensus allows voters to cast their votes in one session, voters may choose to cast their votes in two sessions to ensure that their ballots cannot be linked back to them if the validator and tallier collude. To make this two-session voting more convenient, the pollster could be programmed to automatically begin the second session after a random delay.



Lorrie Faith Cranor
Sun Nov 5 20:54:12 CST 1995