Internet voting in Estonia 2005–2019: Evidence from eleven elections

Internet voting is a highly contested topic in electoral studies. This article examines Internet voting in Estonia over 15 years and 11 nation-wide elections. It focuses on the following questions: How is Internet voting organized and used in Estonia? How have the Estonian Internet voting system and its usage evolved over time? What are the preconditions and consequences of large-scale deployment of Internet voting? The results suggest that the rapid uptake and burgeoning usage rates reflect the system's embeddedness in a highly developed digital state and society. Through continuous technological and legal innovation and development, Estonia has built an advanced Internet voting system that complies with normative standards for democratic elections and is widely trusted and used by the voters. Internet voting has not boosted turnout in a setting where voting was already easily accessible. Neither has it created digital divides: Internet voting in Estonia has diffused to the extent that socio-demographic characteristics no longer predict usage. This, combined with massive uptake, reduces incentives for political parties to politicize the novel voting mode

The impact of blockchain technology on the trustworthiness of online voting systems - an exploration of blockchain-enabled online voting

Online Voting evidently increases election turnouts. However, recent state-owned initiatives have failed due to security concerns and a lack of trust in the systems. Block chain seems to be a very suitable technical solution to establish transparency in online voting and thus, create trust. We have built our own, block chain-enabled voting platform and utilized it to run an A/B-testing experiment at an university election to investigate its effect. Our results which show that students trusted the block chain-based voting version less than the control version can be found in Vysna (2020). The following discussion can be found in Konzok (2020

How not to VoteAgain: Pitfalls of Scalable Coercion-Resistant E-Voting

Secure electronic voting is a relatively trivial exercise if a single authority can be completely trusted. In contrast, the construction of efficient and usable schemes which provide strong security without strong trust assumptions is still an open problem, particularly in the remote setting. Coercion-resistance is one of, if not the hardest property to add to a verifiable e-voting system. Numerous secure e-voting systems have been designed to provide coercion-resistance. One of these systems is VoteAgain (Usenix Security 2020) whose security we revisit in this work. We discovered several pitfalls that break the security properties of VoteAgain in threat scenarios for which it was claimed secure. The most critical consequence of our findings is that there exists a voting authority in VoteAgain which needs to be trusted for all security properties. This means that VoteAgain is as (in)secure as a trivial voting system with a single and completely trusted voting authority. We argue that this problem is intrinsic to VoteAgain\u27s design and could thus only be resolved, if possible, by fundamental modifications. We hope that our work will ensure that VoteAgain is not employed for real elections in its current form. Further, we highlight subtle security pitfalls to avoid on the path towards more efficient, usable, and reasonably secure coercion-resistant e-voting. To this end, we conclude the paper by describing the open problems which need to be solved to make VoteAgain\u27s approach secure

DeVoS: Deniable Yet Verifiable Vote Updating

peer reviewedInternet voting systems are supposed to meet the same high standards as traditional paper-based systems when used in real political elections: freedom of choice, universal and equal suffrage, secrecy of the ballot, and independent verifiability of the election result. Although numerous Internet voting systems have been proposed to achieve these challenging goals simultaneously, few come close in reality. We propose a novel publicly verifiable and practically efficient Internet voting system, DeVoS, that advances the state of the art. The main feature of DeVoS is its ability to protect voters' freedom of choice in several dimensions. First, voters in DeVoS can intuitively update their votes in a way that is deniable to observers but verifiable by the voters; in this way voters can secretly overwrite potentially coerced votes. Second, in addition to (basic) vote privacy, DeVoS also guarantees strong participation privacy by end-to-end hiding which voters have submitted ballots and which have not. Finally, DeVoS is fully compatible with Perfectly Private Audit Trail, a state-of-the-art Internet voting protocol with practical everlasting privacy. In combination, DeVoS offers a new way to secure free Internet elections with strong and long-term privacy properties

DeVoS: Deniable Yet Verifiable Vote Updating

Internet voting systems are supposed to meet the same high standards as traditional paper-based systems when used in real political elections: freedom of choice, universal and equal suffrage, secrecy of the ballot, and independent verifiability of the election result. Although numerous Internet voting systems have been proposed to achieve these challenging goals simultaneously, few come close in reality. We propose a novel publicly verifiable and practically efficient Internet voting system, DeVoS, that advances the state of the art. The main feature of DeVoS is its ability to protect voters\u27 freedom of choice in several dimensions. First, voters in DeVoS can intuitively update their votes in a way that is deniable to observers but verifiable by the voters; in this way voters can secretly overwrite potentially coerced votes. Second, in addition to (basic) vote privacy, DeVoS also guarantees strong participation privacy by end-to-end hiding which voters have submitted ballots and which have not. Finally, DeVoS is fully compatible with Perfectly Private Audit Trail, a state-of-the-art Internet voting protocol with practical everlasting privacy. In combination, DeVoS offers a new way to secure free Internet elections with strong and long-term privacy properties

Cast-as-Intended: A Formal Definition and Case Studies

peer reviewedVerifiable voting systems allow voters to check whether their ballot is correctly recorded (individual verifiability) and allow anyone to check whether votes expressed in recorded ballots are correctly counted (universal verifiability). This suffices to ensure that honest voters’ votes are correctly counted, assuming ballots are properly generated. Achieving ballot assurance, i.e., assuring each voter that their vote is correctly encoded inside their ballot, whilst ensuring privacy, is a challenging aspect of voting system design. This assurance property is known as cast-as-intended. Unlike many properties of voting systems, it has yet to be formalised. We provide the first formal definition and apply our definition to MarkPledge, Prêt à Voter, Selene, ThreeBallot, and schemes based upon Benaloh challenges

An individually verifiable voting protocol with complete recorded-as-intended and counted-as-recorded guarantees

Democratic principles demand that every voter should be able to individually verify that their vote is recorded as intended and counted as recorded, without having to trust any authorities. However, most end-to-end (E2E) verifiable voting protocols that provide universal verifiability and voter secrecy implicitly require to trust some authorities or auditors for the correctness guarantees that they provide. In this paper, we explore the notion of individual verifiability. We evaluate the existing E2E voting protocols and propose a new protocol that guarantees such verifiability without any trust requirements. Our construction depends on a novel vote commitment scheme to capture voter intent that allows voters to obtain a direct zero-knowledge proof of their vote being recorded as intended. We also ensure protection against spurious vote injection or deletion post eligibility verification, and polling-booth level community profiling

Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International JointConference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first in-personconference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event forthe community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-IDconference resulted from merging EVOTE and Vote-ID, and 18 years have now elapsed sincethe first EVOTE conference in Austria.Since that conference in 2004, over 1500 experts have attended the venue, including scholars,practitioners, authorities, electoral managers, vendors, and PhD students. E-Vote-ID collectsthe most relevant debates on the development of electronic voting, from aspects relating tosecurity and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, alsoincluding legal, social, or political aspects, amongst others, turning out to be an importantglobal referent on these issues

COVID-19, Digitization, and the New Normal for Municipal Government: A Study of Three Ontario Cities

The COVID-19 pandemic is viewed as both an unprecedented challenge and an impetus for digital transformation. During the pandemic, a “new normal” discourse emerged predicting a surge in digitization that would radically and permanently change organizations. This paper examines how the pandemic has affected municipal governments through case studies of the City of Windsor, City of Kitchener, and City of Burlington. It compares how each city adapted to the pandemic through digitization and investigates if such changes have transformed citizen participation and governance in the cities under study. The paper focuses on two ways citizens engage with local government: voting in municipal elections and delegating to councils and committees. The paper aims to understand how municipalities facilitated citizen participation during a period of public health guidelines in the province of Ontario which restricted many in-person activities. It finds that digitization was limited in its extent and scope and identifies resource, security, and accessibility considerations as primary barriers to the adoption of digital technologies

Electronic voting : 6th International Joint Conference, E-Vote-ID 2021, virtual event, October 5-8, 2021

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2021, held online -due to COVID -19- in Bregenz, Austria, in October 2021. The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The conference collected the most relevant debates on the development of Electronic Voting, from aspects relating to security and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, as well as legal, social or political aspects