Voting is a cornerstone of collective participatory decision-making in contexts ranging from political elections to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Despite the proliferation of internet voting protocols promising enhanced accessibility and efficiency, their evaluation and comparison are complicated by a lack of standardized criteria and unified definitions of security and maturity. Furthermore, socio-technical requirements by decision makers are not structurally taken into consideration when comparing internet voting systems. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a trust-centric maturity scoring framework to quantify the security and maturity of sixteen internet voting systems. A comprehensive trust model analysis is conducted for selected internet voting protocols, examining their security properties, trust assumptions, technical complexity, and practical usability. In this paper we propose the electronic voting maturity framework (EVMF) which supports nuanced assessment that reflects real-world deployment concerns and aids decision-makers in selecting appropriate systems tailored to their specific use-case requirements. The framework is general enough to be applied to other systems, where the aspects of decentralization, trust, and security are crucial, such as digital identity, Ethereum layer-two scaling solutions, and federated data infrastructures. Its objective is to provide an extendable toolkit for policy makers and technology experts alike that normalizes technical and non-technical requirements on a univariate scale.

翻译：投票是从政治选举到去中心化自治组织（DAOs）等各种集体参与式决策场景的基石。尽管承诺提升可访问性与效率的互联网投票协议不断涌现，但由于缺乏标准化准则以及对安全性和成熟度的统一定义，其评估与比较变得复杂。此外，在比较不同互联网投票系统时，决策者的社会技术需求并未在结构上得到充分考虑。本文通过引入一种基于信任的成熟度评分框架来量化十六种互联网投票系统的安全性与成熟度，从而填补这一空白。我们对选定的互联网投票协议进行了全面的信任模型分析，考察了它们的安全属性、信任假设、技术复杂性和实际可用性。本文提出了电子投票成熟度框架（EVMF），该框架支持细致入微的评估，能够反映实际部署中的关切，并帮助决策者根据其特定用例需求选择合适的系统。该框架具有足够的通用性，可应用于其他去中心化、信任和安全至关重要的系统，例如数字身份、以太坊第二层扩展解决方案以及联邦数据基础设施。其目标是为政策制定者和技术专家提供一个可扩展的工具包，将技术和非技术要求在单变量尺度上进行标准化。