Taking the Best of Both Worlds: A Comparison and Integration of the U.S. and EU Approaches to E-Voting Systems Evaluation

With regard to e-voting system certification, political bodies around the world show very different approaches, ranging from high-level recommendations on the electoral system, not providing the associated details, to procedures that describe specific controls over critical components, not framing them in a ”big picture”. In this work, we compare and integrate two approaches that effectively represent the two extremes of the spectrum. In fact, the EU recommendation can be usefully adopted as a high-level guideline to keep in focus what the ultimate goal of a certification path should be. The U.S.A. field-tested procedures instead provide the necessary concreteness to the operative side of the certification path. The final result of this attempt at taking the best of both worlds is a step towards an applied methodology that turns a conceptually well-conceived, but not directly applicable document into a real testing and certification manual, by exploiting the experience and guidance provided by more pragmatic, but less organized, sources.