Evaluation and Comparison of Swiss Voting Advice Applications

In Switzerland, multiple web-based Voting Advice Applications (VAA) exist [1,3,4]. Germany recently banned a popular VAA [5]. 

Even though some of them publish their procedures [2], they are executed on centralized architectures. Hence, the data can not be independently verified by the user. The goal of this work is to test, compare and critically evaluate the currently deployed Swiss VAAs and perform a Risk Assessment / Security Analysis of the current architectures. The evaluation of current architectures should yield a proposal for an improved, decentralized architecture for VAAs. The testing of currently deployed VAAs can be achieved with the the development of a test bot (e.g. Write a bot with PhantomJS [6] or Apache Nutch [7])

[1] smartvote, [Online] https://www.smartvote.ch/, last visit June 2, 2019

[2] smartvote - methodology, [Online] https://candidate.smartvote.ch/downloads/methodology_recommendation_de_CH.pdf, last visit June 2, 2019

[3] easyvote, [Online] https://www.easyvote.ch, last visit June 2, 2019

[4] vimentis, [Online] https://www.vimentis.ch/ last visit June 2, 2019

[5] Felix Serrao M. - Neue Zürcher Zeitung: Der Wahl-O-Mat für die Europawahl ist offline – eine Chance für mehr politischen Wettbewerb. [Online] https://bit.ly/wahlomat-ban (May 2019), last visit June 2, 2019

[6] PhantomJS,  [Online] http://phantomjs.org/, last visit June 2, 2019

[7] Apache Nutch, [Online] https://nutch.apache.org/, last visit June 2, 2019