Voter, What Message Will Motivate You to Verify Your Vote?

There is increasing interest in verifiable Internet voting systems that enable voters to verify the integrity of their vote on the voting platform prior to casting it, and any interested party to verify the integrity of the election results. The ease with which a vote can be verified plays a key role. Empowering individual voters to act as interested yet objective verifiers increases the probability of fraud detection. Verifying constitutes additional effort, something humans resist unless the benefits are compelling enough. Thus, what is the best way to provide such motivation? We report on a survey, distributed to 123 respondents, in which we explore the effects of three types of motivating messages on voters’ intention to verify a vote, using a smartphone app. The motivating messages were intended to increase the intention to verify a vote. Our findings have persuaded us that further research on the use of motivating messages in the context of verifiable voting is warranted