The difficulty of implementing e-voting is not generally obvious to the public. At first glance, e-voting seems to be a simple case of counting. Conflicting requirements [20] and the differences between implementing e-voting and, say, electronic banking are not immediately obvious, particularly to people with no experience of developing mission- or safety-critical systems.
In the absence of controversy, surveys of voter attitudes usually reflect satisfaction and trust (for example [22]). When concerns are raised by experts and in the media, however, public opinion can change dramatically. For example: in Ireland in 2003 a survey by Amarach Consulting found that a majority of Irish citizens were in favour of the introduction of e-voting [15]. Less than a year later, after controversy over the system had led to the establishment of the Commission on Electronic Voting, a Red C survey found that 58% of respondents felt that ``...the [e-voting] proposal should be scrapped until such time as a paper back-up is incorporated into the system ...'' and ``one third of all voters were unconvinced that their choices will be registered properly'' [1].
This instinctive trust of e-voting systems also appears to exist amongst officials. When government representatives speak about e-voting it tends to be in very positive terms. Their statements emphasise the benefits of e-voting; the largest obstacle, from their point of view, is usually gaining the voters' trust. The idea that the system in question might not deserve such trust is given little or no attention, except where it overlaps with ``allay[ing] public concern'' about the security of the system [4]. Two prime examples of this are the webpages for the voting systems of the Irish Government and the Swiss state of Geneva [12,11].
In reality, implementing e-voting is not so simple. Mercuri identified one of the most significant obstacles - the conflict between the requirements for secrecy and accuracy [20]. Serious problems also arise from the way in which voting systems are currently developed. To our knowledge there is still no voting system that has been treated as safety-critical in its development and deployment [18]. The components of the systems are, in general, proprietary [24,19]. These and other factors have combined to create serious issues in legally binding elections. Examples of worrying incidents in real elections in the US have been gathered by the Verified Voting Foundation's Election Incident Reporting System [25].