6,602 research outputs found

    Combatting electoral traces: the Dutch tempest discussion and beyond

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    In the Dutch e-voting debate, the crucial issue leading to the abandonment of all electronic voting machines was compromising radiation, or tempest. Other countries, however, do not seem to be bothered by this risk. In this paper, we use actor-network theory to analyse the socio-technical origins of the Dutch tempest issue in e-voting, and its consequences for e-voting beyond the Netherlands. We introduce the term electoral traces to denote any physical, digital or social evidence of a voter's choices in an election. From this perspective, we provide guidelines for risk analysis as well as an overview of countermeasures

    Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

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    Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique, challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts: convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1

    Identifying Challenges and Advantages of Internet Voting and Assessing the Impact on Voters Turnout in Municipal Elections

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    The paper identifies obstacles, opportunities, and more significant potential for elections through e-voting. The study uses litterateur review and statistical data assessments of e-voting in Ontario municipal elections to identify the impacts of e-voting on voter turnout. The research\u27s anticipated findings show e-voting presents substantial challenges for governments, including privacy and data protection and constantly updating policies to keep up with evolving technologies. The challenges must be addressed while maintaining voters\u27 privacy and trust in the voting processes. The research provides literature and recommendations for further research on e-voting in the municipalities that will support developing a strategy ensuring a feasible electronic voting process

    Helping America Vote: Safeguarding the Vote

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    In 2002 Congress enacted the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) authorizing $3.9 billion to modernize and improve federal elections. Debate over how to fulfill the requirements of the new law has focused on new technology, both new voting machines and computerized statewide registration systems.Yet, as election officials well understand, new, sophisticated technology alone will not solve the ills that surfaced in the 2000 presidential election. Sound administrative practices are equally necessary to ensure that elections are run both fairly and accurately. And much less has been said on this subject.According to the law's congressional authors, HAVA is intended to ensure that eligible voters are able to cast a vote and have that vote counted accurately. The law established minimum federal requirements to protect both eligible voters and valid votes, thus providing stronger security for the election process.In this report, the League of Women Voters focuses not on the technology, about which much has already been said and written, but on the administrative framework that will deploy new technologies and management systems to meet the goals of greater accuracy and security. The report sets forth a set of recommended operational and management practices for election officials that protect eligible voters, ensure valid votes will be counted and bolster voters' confidence.In "Election Reform and Electronic Voting Systems (DREs): Analysis of Security Issues," (2003) a report issued by the Congressional Research Service, three widely accepted elements of defense against security risks are cited: technology, personnel and operations. This League report adopts that framework, but focuses primarily on the latter two elements, personnel and operations.Technological security defenses will be addressed by guidelines developed by the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in cooperation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).In 2002, elections officials in Florida discovered the cost of focusing on technology without equal emphasis on personnel and operations. One county purchased all new electronic voting systems only to discover in the 2002 gubernatorial primary that its process for administering the new machines was flawed -- ballots were incorrectly loaded -- and its poll workers had not been adequately trained on how to operate the new machines. As a consequence, many polls opened late and some never opened at all.The same principle holds true with regard to voter registration. Example: In 2000, Florida paid a firm to conduct a computerized match of the voter rolls against felon lists. The resulting list of felons that the state then transmitted to counties for purging had an accuracy rate of only 80 percent. Counties that purged the voters without verifying the information found that they had erroneously removed eligible voters from the rolls. In both cases, technological solutions provided voters no protection against flawed management of that technology.As states purchase new voting machines and create statewide registration systems, they will need to pay equal attention to administrative and management practices.This report culls from interviews with election officials and other experts a set of practices that can provide a more secure foundation for two key components of election administration: voting systems and voter registration systems. The recommendations offered below are based on practices already in use. In other words, they are not theoretical but practical

    The Legal Aspects and the Enhanced Role of Cybersecurity in Protecting the Electronic Voting Process in the Context of Jordan Parliament Election Law No. (4) of 2022

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    This study, entitled: The legal aspects and the enhanced role of cybersecurity in protecting the electronic voting process , dealt with the concept of the electronic voting process, in addition to the most important characteristics of that process, as well as highlighting the pros and cons related to the electronic voting system. Then, the researchers singled out a proposed approach for the electronic voting process in terms of the adopted mechanism and cyber protection in accordance with the provisions of the Jordanian Election Law No. (4) of 2022. At the end of the research, the researchers recommended activating the text of Article 40 of the electoral law by issuing legislation that regulates the electronic voting process and enhances the protection of cyber security, and then updating the technical and legislative system of the Independent Election Commission and the Ministry of Political Development

    XML Based Security Model for Enhancing the Integrity and the Privacy of E-Voting Systems

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    As the world is becoming more technological, using electronic voting could be very beneficial in elections rather using traditional paper-based election schemes. However, there are many security related issues that can cause significant problems in electronic voting (e-voting). Violating voters’ privacy or integrity of ballots would definitely cause serious problems with the entire election process. People may refuse to accept the electronic form of elections. Existing e-voting systems use sophisticated but inefficient, and expensive techniques to satisfy the security requirements of e-voting. Therefore, most of small and mid-size electoral populations cannot employ e-voting systems in their elections and experience remarkable benefits of e-voting. In this thesis, a new electronic voting approach is proposed using extensible markup language (XML) to verify and secure the integrity as well as to preserve the privacy of the voters. The evaluation results of this thesis show that the new approach is an implementation friendly, efficient, and also cost-effective approach to safeguard integrity and privacy related security requirements of e-voting systems for small and mid-size electoral populations

    State of Alaska Election Security Project Phase 2 Report

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    A laska’s election system is among the most secure in the country, and it has a number of safeguards other states are now adopting. But the technology Alaska uses to record and count votes could be improved— and the state’s huge size, limited road system, and scattered communities also create special challenges for insuring the integrity of the vote. In this second phase of an ongoing study of Alaska’s election security, we recommend ways of strengthening the system—not only the technology but also the election procedures. The lieutenant governor and the Division of Elections asked the University of Alaska Anchorage to do this evaluation, which began in September 2007.Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell. State of Alaska Division of Elections.List of Appendices / Glossary / Study Team / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Summary of Recommendations / Part 1 Defense in Depth / Part 2 Fortification of Systems / Part 3 Confidence in Outcomes / Conclusions / Proposed Statement of Work for Phase 3: Implementation / Reference

    A novel smart contract based blockchain with sidechain for electronic voting

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    Several countries have been researching digital voting methods in order to overcome the challenges of paper balloting and physical voting. The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic has compelled the remote implementation of existing systems and procedures. Online voting will ultimately become the norm just like unified payments interface (UPI) payments and online banking. With digital voting or electronic voting (e-voting) a small bug can cause massive vote rigging. E-voting must be honest, exact, safe, and simple. E-voting is vulnerable to malware, which can disrupt servers. Blockchain’s end-to-end validation solves these problems. Three smart contracts-voter, candidate, and voting-are employed. The problem of fraudulent actions is addressed using vote coins. Vote coins indicate voter status. Sidechain technology complements blockchain. Sidechains improve blockchain functionality by performing operations outside of blockchains and delivering the results to the mainchain. Thus, storing the encrypted vote on the sidechain and using the decrypted result on the mainchain reduces cost. Building access control policies to grant only authorized users’ access to the votes for counting is made simpler by this authorization paradigm. Results of the approach depict the proposed e-voting system improves system security against replay attacks and reduces the processing cost as well as processing time

    HCI in e-Government and e-Democracy

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    This chapter introduces the application of HCI design processes and design principles in e-government and e-democracy. We elaborate on HCI design processes and six HCI design principles in the context of e-government and e-democracy, including citizen-centered design, usability, accessibility, access to information, transaction efficiency, and security and privacy. Then, we present two cases to demonstrate the value of applying the HCI processes and design principles in developing and deploying e-government and e-democracy. Finally, we highlight the challenges faced by e-government and e-democracy as well as the future trends. In conclusion, HCI can help the success of e-government and e-democracy and their future growth
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