Electronic Voting

Electronic voting has been attracting the attention of governments and research groups with most work on the subject referring to the user requirements such a system should satisfy. For several cases, though, requirement identification seldom goes further than a simple narrative description of a basic set of nonfunctional characteristics related to security. On the other hand, governmental reports usually refer to requirements as the set of applicable laws pertaining a certain voting procedure. Both sides seem to underestimate the fact that an electronic voting system is an information system with functional, as well as non-functional, requirements. In this paper we apply the Rational Software Development Process for identifying and presenting the requirements an electronic voting system should meet. The requirements are based on a generic voting model that has been developed having in mind the European Union member states legislation, the organisational details of currently applicable voting procedures and the opportunities offered and the constraints imposed by the state-of-the-art technology.

Voting in uncontrolled environment either by post or by the Internet is about to be made generally available in many countries. The main purpose is to increase participation at times when the voter turnout is generally decreasing. Electronic voting both in or outside controlled environment offers advantages in producing fast and reliable results and long term cost savings in the conduct of elections. A number of problems relating to security, reliability and general trust can be solved by Internet voting, once an infrastructure for voter identification is in place. However, neither postal votes nor Internet votes can guarantee that the vote is cast in secrecy without intimidation or pressure. Even without the most serious violations to a free vote, the pattern of voting will change and the concept of voting being a strictly personal and secret act is likely to be weakened over time. There are few reasons to doubt that the introduction of voting by Internet once generally available w...

In this panel, a group of practitioners and researchers in the area of online political organizing will present their own research in this area and discuss the relevance of online political organizing to the current political scene -including the U.S. general presidential election, which has just been completed. Panelists come from across the political spectrum and also represent views of the political process in countries other than the United States. What are the tools used in online political organizing? What role do each of these new tools bring to the campaign/election process? How effective have they proven in this election cycle? What is their utility outside the scope of the presidential election cycle? Are they merely "teaser" tools to get people in the door or do they have the potential to facilitate lasting political change in all political arenas large and small? In addition, electronic voting is a current open research area. What do systems need to take into account to assure voters' confidence that their votes are being collected and tallied correctly and securely? What information needs to be presented to the voter at the time of polling to ensure the most effective voting systems available? What do we know at this point and where are the future research areas that need scrutiny? Each panelist will present their current research related to this area and comment on the ways in which their findings add to the current body of knowledge. Particular attention will be paid to articulating research streams that currently need to be addressed and positing methods to address these open research questions.

The requirement for a collaborative effort to achieve a common set of security standards for use by entities that process, store or transport voter data. -More than 350,000 voting machines are used in the Unites States today in over 42 States (VerifiedVoting 2017). The rise in the use of electronic mediums has posed great concern for those voting and those running for office. In 2016, the State of Florida reported the targeted attempts by Russian hackers to infiltrate and manipulate electronic voting in as much as 67 elections offices. As well reporting from additional sources that as many as voter database compromises across 21 states and forensics discovery at attempts by hackers to infiltrate the networks of voting equipment vendors, local election boards, political parties and email and social media accounts for candidates.  The industry and cyber security community has not discovered a process to protect the most democratic process in the world to date – Voting remains a target held at risk. 2018 Elections are critical to moving the U.S. forward to recovery - Feel free to reach out if you need support or have any additional questions.

as modificaciones realizadas al proceso electoral de 2012 no parecen haber resuelto los problemas estructurales detectados en 2006 que derivaron en una baja participación de los mexicanos en el exterior y en la dispersión de esfuerzos institucionales. Palabras claves: mexicanos en el exterior; voto en el extranjero; elecciones 2006, elecciones 2012; retos institucionales. Abstract: Modifications to the 2012 electoral process does not appear to have solved the structural problems identified in 2006 which resulted in low participation of Mexicans abroad and in the dispersion of institutional efforts.

PËRMBLEDHJE Sipas raportit të Komisionit Qendror të Zgjedhjeve-KQZ në zgjedhjet e 12 dhjetorit 2010 në Kosovë ishin të regjistruar 1,630,636 qytetarë me të drejtë vote, të shpërndarë në 746 qendra votimi me gjithsej 2,280 vendvotime. E statistikat botërore tregojnë se zhvillimi i hovshëm i Teknologjisë së Informacionit dhe të Komunikimit ka sjellë edhe automatizimin e shumë proceseve, si në biznes ashtu edhe në lëmenjtë e tjerë të jetës. Duke pasur parasysh këtë zhvillim shumë vende pretendojnë të kalojnë nga votimi tradicional në votimin elektronik, e bazuar në raportin e KQZ ia vlen që të ngritët një sistem i këtillë edhe në Kosovë. Ky punim mëton, që: (i) duke analizuar arkitekturën e përshtatshme për sistemin e këtillë dhe sigurinë e të dhënave, të propozojë ngritjen e një sistemi të votimit elektronik në Kosovë, dhe (ii) duke analizuar efektet e mundshme nga aplikimi i një sistemi të këtillë elekt ronik të bindë vendimmarrësit për të përkrahur ngritjen e sistemit. Veçoritë e sistemit elektronik që do të analizohen janë: autentikimi i sigurt në pajisjet e përzgjedhura, bartja e sigurt e informacioneve të ndërlidhura me votën dhe votimin, dhe më e rëndësishmja saktësia dhe shpejtësia e paraqitjes së rezultateve të votimit, e që do të bazohen në veçoritë biometrike (gjurmët e gishtërinjve) dhe në certifikatat digjitale me mundësi votimi edhe nga interneti ose nga shtëpia. Rezultat dhe dobi e e votimit, përveç shpejtësisë dhe saktësisë së numërimit, është edhe kursimi i parasë publike, pasi që sistemi i takon tipit "ndërto një herë përdor shumë herë".

This report is a review of research into the use of electronic voting systems to support lectures. This review, which was undertaken through funding from the Sub- Committee on Innovations in Learning, Teaching and Assessment, provides an overview of the potential of such systems; it also identifies issues associated with their use.
Based on this review, it has been concluded that:
• Voting systems are best understood as a tool rather than a teaching approach. They do not ‘cause’ good learning – in fact, if poorly prepared or used for their own sake, students were extremely critical of them. However, when lecturers used these tools as part of a wider effort to support active engagement with learning there is evidence that they can support increased motivation and attainment, at least in part as a result of their ability to provide rapid feedback on the learning process.
• Such systems represent an opportunity to improve lecturing. The requirement to emphasise engagement and interaction with students prompts lecturers to reflect on qualities believed to characterise good teaching.
• Such systems build on work already undertaken in college, in areas such as technology and lecturing, confidence assessment and objective testing.
• The introduction of such a system has resource implications. The direct costs of such a system are in the region of £10,000-£60,000 for a lecture theatre for 250 students. In addition, there are indirect costs in terms of lecturers’ time (to learn how to use the system and reflect on how it will change their teaching), support staff time (including Media Resources and Information Services) and for staff time to provide pedagogic support (e.g. involvement in a SCILTA project or a secondment to Education & Professional Development).
• In addition, practical issues such as the installation and mobility of the resource would need to be addressed.

Dans ce travail, nous présentons un modèle de vote électronique sécurisé permettant de respecter sous la seule hypothèse de la fiabilité du système, la totalité des propriétés de sécurité existantes du vote électronique. La démarche de mise sur pied de ce modèle a consisté en l'énumération des différentes propriétés de vote. Et après une modélisation de chacune d'elles, une démonstration que certaines d'entre elles, ne pourraient coexister de façon inconditionnelle a été effectuée. Dans l'optique d'apporter une solution à cette incompatibilité, nous avons bâti un modèle de vote qui sous certaines conditions et hypothèses, pourrait permettre la coexistence de toutes ces propriétés de sécurité. Et, nous avons conçu et développé un système informatique qui basé sur ce modèle, propose des règles et procé-ures permettant d'atteindre ces conditions et possède de ce fait les différentes propriétés de sécurité du vote électronique

Public opinion is the belief or thought of a group of people regarding a particular topic, especially on politics, religion, social issues, demographic diversity, etc. The opinion of the individual may be sensitive since it reflects the perception, understanding, belief, conflict, and desire of that individual. The traditional mechanisms of collecting public opinions (e.g., survey, questionnaire, interviewer, mailing) are often compromising individual's privacy. Those mechanisms do not anonymize the individual's identity. Therefore people are often abstained from expressing their rational opinions. The electronic opinion collection systems are designed with a central server that keeps all the user's profiles, which may be linked the opinions, thereby compromises the privacy. In this paper, we present a multiparty opinion collecting and publishing protocol that preserves the user's identity. The protocol does not rely on any trusted third party (e.g. central server). It rather forms quorums to execute the process. Party independently cannot learn the individual's opinions. Moreover, the protocol publishes the opinions anonymously, thereby preserves the privacy of the individuals.

Finger vein division is a significant issue in the unique mark acknowledgment framework. A finger vein picture must be sectioned to evacuate uninterested areas in different advances, for example, improvement and details identification with the goal of the picture handling will expend less CPU time. The picture of finger vein comprises various areas such as non-edge districts, top-notch edge locales, and low-quality edge areas. Finger vein identification is, as a rule, to recognize non-edge districts and unrecoverable low-quality edge areas and reject them as a foundation. Most division techniques are square wised which, partition the finger vein picture into uncovered squares and settle on the foundation and frontal area of each square. Some different strategies are pixel-wised ones which decide the sort of every pixel. Finger vein correction regularly registers the component (or highlight vector) of every component, square or pixel, and afterward decides the component's sort dependent on the element (vector). The highlights utilized in finger vein division for the foremost part incorporate measurable highlights of pixel power, directional picture, and edge projection. The proposed Finger vein Identification and check System may be a biometric recognizable proof technique that utilizes computerized imaging innovation to accumulate, store, and investigate finger vein information. Here we are presenting another technique for finger vein ID innovation by utilizing SVM calculation.

The State of Ohio commissioned the EVEREST study in late summer of 2007. The study participants were charged with an analysis of the usability, stability, and security of all voting systems used in Ohio elections. This paper details the approach and results of the security analysis of the Premier and Hart systems within the EVEREST effort. As in previous studies, we found the election systems to be critically flawed in ways that are practically and easily exploitable. Such exploits could effect election results, prevent legitimate votes from being cast, or simply cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election itself. In this effort we identified new areas of concern including novel exploitable failures of software and election data integrity protection and the discovery of dangerous hidden software features. We begin by describing in depth our systematic methodology for identifying and validating vulnerabilities appropriate for the current complex political climate, and detail and illustrate broad classes of vulnerabilities uncovered using this approach. We conclude by considering the impact of this study both in terms of the tangible vulnerabilities discovered and as a model for performing future analyses.

This paper presents an analysis of the requirements specification in electronic voting systems. In particular, it poses a specification that assumes a physical distributed architecture model with two networked intelligent units (Voting Terminal and Authorities Terminal). State Transition Diagrams and Use Cases are used in the modeling of the requirements. Finally, the model adaptation to two classes of different elections is analyzed: a national election of closed daily cycle and a university election with a cycle of several days, both with multiple objectives.

Evidences have shown that it is only the electronic voting system that can deliver credible, fraud free elections in Nigeria. The delay in the implementation of this platform in Nigeria has nothing to do with the electorates with previous studies revealing the readiness of Nigerians to use and accept the electronic voting system. The major bottleneck has to do with the body entrusted with the responsibility of conducting election in the country i.e. Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). This motivates the researcher to examine what can be done at this level to achieve successful implementation of this technology. In this paper, a conceptual framework for the study is presented integrating Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) model, Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework and Iacovou et al. constructs. The presented framework serves as the basis of this study.

Being a poster child of digital state, Estonia is a truly right place to find answers to the question on how it should be done first when it comes to achieving a real progress in modernizing governance through the use of information and communication technologies. It seems interesting to research how this nation promotes one of the latest trends in the development of the e-government concept—open data. In this regard, the chapter aims to understand what kind of political and socioeconomic drivers and challenges Estonia faces today in the diffusion of the open data concept among various stakeholders, namely government officials, developers, businesses, journalists, academia, and non-governmental organizations and how overcomes them, especially in areas that are related to the publication and, more importantly, to the reuse of datasets by third parties in various collaborative projects and civic engagement platforms.

In this technological and knowledge age, e-commerce related matters become popular. Electronic voting is one of these matters and it is able to provide convenient, less expensive, fast and secure facilities. Important basic properties of electronic voting are fairness, privacy, eligibility, receiptfreeness, coercion-resistance and verifiability. Current electronic voting systems satisfy only some of these properties. So, the proposed system aims to design and implement an electronic voting system which satisfies the required properties of electronic voting process. After implementing the system, it will be verified using mCRL2 language in order to prove the satisfaction of the security properties. The performance of the proposed system will be compared with the other existing e-voting systems.

The term "Electronic Voting (e-voting)" refers to the use of computers or computerized equipment to cast votes in an election. e-voting aims at increasing participation, lowering the costs of running elections and improving the accuracy of the results. This paper details the requirements, design and implementation of a special type of electronic voting systems, the remote on-line voting system, suitable for university setting where students can cast their votes anytime, anywhere and using fixed and mobile electronic devices including personal computers, personal digital assistants and smart and regular phones. To avoid web content replication for each of the connecting devices, the implemented system separates the data content from its presentation form. The separation is achieved by using modern technologies such as the extensible markup language to represent the web data content and the extensible style language transformation style sheets to customize the presentation of such content on different connecting devices, thus, achieving true "author once, publish to any device" design and implementation.

A blockchain is a distributed, digitized and consensus-based secure information storage mechanism. The present article provides an overview of blockchain based e-voting systems. The primary purpose of this review is to study the up-to-date state of blockchain-based voting research along with associated possible challenges while aiming to forecast future directions. The methodology applied in the review is a systematic review approach. Following an introduction to the basic structure and features of the blockchain in relation to e-voting, we provide a conceptual description of the desired blockchain-based e-voting application. Symmetrical and asymmetrical cryptography improvements play a key role in developing blockchain systems. We have extracted and reviewed 63 research papers from scientific databases that have advised the adoption of the blockchain framework to voting systems. These articles indicate that blockchain-supported voting systems may provide different solutions than traditional e-voting. We classified the main prevailing issues into the five following categories: general, integrity, coin-based, privacy and consensus. As a result of this research, it was determined that blockchain systems can provide solutions to certain problems that prevail in current election systems. On the other hand, privacy protection and transaction speed are most frequently emphasized problems in blockchain applications. Security of remote participation and scalability should be improved for sustainable blockchain based e-voting. It was concluded that frameworks needed enhancements in order to be used in voting systems due to these reservations.

This paper presents an analysis of the requirements specification in electronic voting systems. In particular, it poses a specification that assumes a physical distributed architecture model with two networked intelligent units (Voting Terminal and Authorities Terminal). State Transition Diagrams and Use Cases are used in the modeling of the requirements. Finally, the model adaptation to two classes of different elections

... This architectural model is general enough to be used in the design of a number of e-learning systems. As Kennedy and Cutts [9] point out an important com-ponent to be provided with an EVS used in the context of education is one that gives the opportunity to students to ...

This project deals with the design and development of a Biometric Electronic Voting System. The suggested fingerprint voting system allows the user to scan his fingerprint, in order to check his eligibility by comparing his current fingerprint with the one already stored in the system’s database, by the use of Digital Persona Fingerprint Recognition Algorithm shows better result if it compared with other algorithms that depend on Minutiae technique because it combines both local and global features.

A friendly graphical interface developed from VB.net programming language and linked with Microsoft Sql server database for data manipulations.  Once the voters complete the identification process, they will be allowed to cast their vote using friendly user interface developed using visual basic programming language. The counting of the votes will be automatically and that makes the voting process efficient, fast, and secure.

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Several records of violence during student body elections in higher institutions of learning can be found dating back to the 1988 Abu crisis. The causal factors are multifaceted, involving both internal factors within the institution and external factors, and interest parties like main stream politicians. Suspicion of the possibility of rigging during a planned election can trigger pre-election violence, while alleged rigging during the election or the vote counting process is the major cause of election unrest during student government elections. The voting process is typically manual, and it is done through the use of ballot boxes and papers. This is error prone, inefficient and susceptible to rigging. Preventing mistrust-induced election violence requires the deployment of a trustworthy alternative to the paper ballot system. In this study, an electronic voting system is developed using Visual Basic and Microsoft Access Database. The application performs voter authentication by verifying a pre-issued pin which is unique for each voter. The system is accurate and engages the participation and login of agents who are representatives of the candidates’ contesting for various offices thereby building trust in the process.

A deepening political crisis in Europe is accompanied by increasing civil discontent which directly translates into decreasing trust in political systems and political outcomes deficit of legitimacy. It is already contributing to the emergence of potentially dangerous and exclusive policies as populism and Euroscepticism is on spectacular rise, endangering liberal democracies of the continent and the European regional project. Therefore, a search for political innovation that could effectively address these issues is excessively justified. This thesis seeks to offer a solution by investigating the possibilities to extend popular sovereignty of citizens via the better integration of technological advances into the political life of European states. Such intention could not only carry the possibility to nurse some of the most serious societal grievances but also would adopt the conduct of 21st century politics to the ongoing trends set out by the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Electronic voting (e-voting) has been attracting the attention of governments around the world. Many countries have pursued implementing e-voting systems in their national elections. This article presents a case study of an e-voting system deployment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The UAE has conducted its Federal National Council (FNC) elections for the 2011-2015 session of the National Assembly using an advanced e-voting system with biometric-based smart cards to verify voters' identities. The article provides detailed insights on the phases of the project, from the design phase up to election day. The article also provides a comprehensive overview of the current literature around e-voting in order to enhance understanding of the field and of global practices.

RESUMEN: Durante el puntofijismo, periodo entre 1959 y 2008 cuando en el sistema político venezolano fue hegemónico el bipartidismo, la administración electoral respondía a los intereses de los partidos políticos y se cernían dudas relevantes sobre la sinceridad de los resultados electorales. La Constitución venezolana de 1999 asumió la necesidad de una mayor participación como fundamento de la legitimidad de los poderes constituidos, y creó un nuevo Poder Electoralcon el Consejo Nacional Electoral al frente-con responsabilidades de administración electoral. Las dificultades de esta nueva institucionalidad electoral, que debe lidiar además con un clima político muy polarizado y con la herencia del fraude electoral, han sido en buena medida solucionadas por la implantación de uno de los sistemas de voto electrónico más avanzados del mundo, y adaptado a la evolución de las necesidades venezolanas.

Ethereum is an open-source, public, block chain-based distributed computing platform and operating system featuring smart contract functionality. In this paper, we proposed an Ethereum based electronic voting (e-voting) protocol, Ques-Chain, which can ensure the authentication can be done without hurting confidentiality and the anonymity can be protected without problems of scams at the same time. Furthermore, the authors considered the wider usages Ques-Chain can be applied on, pointing out that it is able to process all kinds of messages and can be used in all fields with similar needs.