Secure and Verifiable Electronic Voting in Practice: the use of vVote in the Victorian State Election

The November 2014 Australian State of Victoria election was the first statutory political election worldwide at State level which deployed an end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system in polling places. This was the first time blind voters have been able to cast a fully secret ballot in a verifiable way, and the first time a verifiable voting system has been used to collect remote votes in a political election. The code is open source, and the output from the election is verifiable. The system took 1121 votes from these particular groups, an increase on 2010 and with fewer polling places

Making a Case for e-Voting in Nigeria

The challenge of developing an acceptable voting system that can reduce the manipulation and falsification of election results has been a major issue in Nigeria over the decades. The consequences of the perception of voting fraud have led to social upheavals with negative implication for the polity. Post election experiences, such as eruption of violence, prolonged litigation and sometimes culminating in the collapse of the democratic experiment, have informed the muting of ideas to create a leak prove voting system to surmount the challenges of electoral manipulation. The open ballot system was adopted in the Third Republic to reduce incidences of election rigging associated with the secret ballot system which was in use before then. This was modified and used to conduct the aborted 1993 presidential election in Nigeria. Though most analysts saw the modified system as an improvement over the voting systems previously used in the country, the secret ballot system re-emerged in the Fourth Republic and for fifteen years has been in use with its attendant fraud-prone shortcomings. Calls for improvement informed the recommendation by the Uwaise Commission and the National Conference for adoption of electronic voting system. This paper employs secondary sources and descriptive analysis in the gathering and analysis of data respectively. Findings reveal the unsuitability for the Nigerian political environment, of the various voting systems adopted in the country, particularly, the secret and the open ballot system. It therefore advocates a faithful application of the system of electronic voting which has been found capable of eliminating the flaws of traditional voting system and enhancing the credibility of election results in the country

Open Voting Client Architecture and Op-Ed Voting: A Novel Framework for Solving Requirement Conflicts in Secret Ballot Elections

Building voting systems for secret ballot elections has many challenges and is the subject of significant academic research efforts. These challenges come from conflicting requirements. In this paper, we introduce a novel architectural approach to voting system construction that may help satisfy conflicting requirements and increase voter satisfaction. Our design, called Open Voting Client Architecture, defines a voting system architectural approach that can harness the power of individualized voting clients. In this work, we contribute a voting system reference architecture to depict the current voting system construction and then use it to define Open Voting Client Architecture. We then detail a specific implementation called Op-Ed Voting to evaluate the security of Open Voting Client Architecture systems. We show that Op-Ed Voting, using voters\u27 personal devices in an end-to-end verifiable protocol, can potentially improve usability and accessibility for voters while also satisfying security requirements for electronic voting

Who Counts Your Votes?

Open and fair elections are paramount to modern democracy. Although some people claim that the penciland- paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding vote rigging, recent election problems have sparked great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. It is a goal of this paper to describe a voting system that is secret and secure as well as verifiable and useable over an existing computer network. We have designed and implemented an electronic voting system – Verifiable E-Voting (VEV) – with an underlying protocol that secures the election process from malicious practices at the same time as allowing voters and candidates to verify the correctness of their votes

Proof of the possibility for a public audit of a secret internet voting system

The aim of this study is to prove the possibility of building a system of secret Internet voting, in which a full-fledged audit is available to all voters and their proxies. A full-fledged audit should be understood as such an audit, in which everything that may be in doubt is checked. The open block of servers was created using Raspberry Pi 3 Model B type minicomputers, which are widely known and well-established. On the basis of an open block of servers, a full-scale model of the system for conducting experimental voting was created and a detailed methodology for a full-fledged audit was developed. This methodology provides for two stages of the audit. In the first stage, voters or their proxies must be present near the server unit. In the second stage, they continue the audit remotely through a dedicated server without losing information about the security of their data. For practical acquaintance with this research, the possibility of experimental voting is given. The experiment can be conducted by anyone at any time through a link on the Internet. Thus, it is shown that not only with traditional secret voting technologies, a full-fledged audit is possible, thanks to which voters have no doubts about maintaining the secrecy of their votes and the honesty of the results. To conduct a full-fledged audit according to the described methodology, it is not require to involve highly qualified specialists, but school education, which is mandatory in many countries, is quite enough. The importance of the results is that the lack of a full-fledged audit of Internet voting systems is the main factor hindering the development of e-democracy. The lack of public auditing of Internet voting systems causes distrust in the possibility of using the Internet to conduct fair election

RIES: Internet voting in action

RIES stands for Rijnland Internet Election System. It is an online voting system that was developed by one of the Dutch local authorities on water management. The system has been used twice in the fall of 2004 for in total approximately two million potential voters. In this paper we describe how this system works. Furthermore we do not only describe how the outcome of the elections can be verified but also how it has been verified by us. To conclude the paper we describe some possible points for improvement

Public Evidence from Secret Ballots

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