"In my opinion, the auditing steps are sufficient."- Trust in elections, software, and RLAs

The standard way to tally ballots in Germany is to manually count ballots at the polling station. However, some local elections use so complex ballots and voting rules that software is also used to capture the content of each ballot. The corresponding software itself nor the software’s results in terms of number of votes per party and per candidate are subject to independent auditing. We wanted to understand how this situation influences voters’ trust in such elections and what proposals would increase their trust. We conducted 16 semi-structured interviews with people who had participated in such complex elections. We make the following observations: trust in the election is overall very high, there is a lack of awareness regarding the use of software, and once made aware the main concern are the humans in the loop. Unprompted critical thinking about software which may manipulate the election outcome was observed only rarely.When talking about auditing approaches, our participants focused on low-effort approaches.