Revisiting the Security-Usability Tradeoff in Internet Voting: A Replication Study Beyond University Populations

Electronic voting systems must balance security requirements with usability to ensure voter acceptance. Kulyk et al. found that participants preferred the most secure voting system despite its lower usability. However, their study exclusively involved university students and employees, limiting the generalizability of the findings. We replicated this study with 24 participants aged 18 to over 75 years from diverse occupational backgrounds.
Our results partially replicate the original findings. The usability ranking remained stable, with the least secure system receiving the highest usability ratings and the most secure system the lowest. In contrast, participant preferences showed a trend toward differing from the original study. While the original study reported a preference for the most secure system, participants in our replication predominantly selected an intermediate system balancing security and usability.
These findings suggest that perceptions of usability costs associated with security mechanisms generalize across populations, whereas preferences regarding acceptable security-usability tradeoffs may depend on the characteristics of the population under investigation.