Vote casting device with VV-SV-PAT for elections with complicated ballot papers

Some ballots such as those for local elections in Germany contain more than 500 candidates, allow for more than 70 votes and the system allows voters to perform cumulative voting, vote splitting and crossing out of candidates which results in huge ballot papers containing only one race. As none of the existing electronic voting systems seem to be feasible for this kind of election we propose a new approach in this paper. The main idea is to have a vote casting device that does not store votes but only prints a summary of the selection voters made at device. This printout is put into the ballot box. In addition, to the human readable summary, the so called Voter Verifiable Summary of the Vote Paper Audit Trail (VV-SV-PAT) contains a 2D barcode which makes it easier to properly enter votes into the counting software. In addition, we propose an improvement for the counting software. With this approach we aim to support the actual procedure of vote casting and tallying by an accurate use of technology while at the same time preserving, or even improving, verifiability and usability compared to the traditional system.