In defence of democracy: the criminalisation of impersonation

This article offers a philosophical justification for the criminalisation of voting as another person (impersonation or, in English law, personation) in public elections by arguing that it involves wrongdoing in the form of anti-democratic behaviour and that the failure to criminalise it will harm the public good of electoral integrity. With regard to harm, the article argues that the failure to criminalise impersonation will eventually result in widespread impersonation, such widespread impersonation undermining electoral integrity, itself instrumental to a number of public goods reflecting the democratic character of any given polity. Finally, the article completes the case for criminalisation by arguing that, in any given jurisdiction, it may be neither effective nor desirable for the entire burden of preventing impersonation to fall onto the civil law, with the result that the criminalisation of impersonation can serve a useful complementary role to the civil law in maintaining electoral integrity

Towards Security Requirements in Online Summative Assessments

Confidentiality, integrity and availability (C-I-A) are the security requirements fundamental to any computer system. Similarly, the hardware, software and data are important critical assets. These two components of a computer security framework are entwined; such that a compromise in the C-I-A requirements may lead to a compromise of the critical assets. The C-I-A requirements and the critical assets of a computer system are well researched areas; however they may be insufficient to define the needs of a summative e-assessment system. In this paper, we do not discard the existing components; rather we propose security requirements and related components that are specific to summative e-assessment systems