Usability of mobile voting with NFC technology

Abstract

Voting is a method to select one opinion or a person often following discussion, debate or an election campaign. After centuries of paper based voting ballots, electronic voting is used along with various technologies. One of the promising technologies is Near Field Communication (NFC) which allows data transfer between NFC-enabled devices and smart tags within a short distance. In this paper, we have presented a new type of a secure voting system, namely NFC voting, and evaluated the system's usability in a university council election with an executable prototype. Among other findings, we found that NFC voting satisfies electronic voting requirements and further increases the subjective usability of the proposed system.