Problemi delle democrazie contemporanee: il voto elettronico

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in elections has increased considerably in recent years. Today, almost all electoral processes take advantage of new technologies, at least in voter registration and tabulation of results, and many countries use these new technologies in voting and counting as well. Taking into account that an election can be defined as democratic if it has specific features, the aim of this research was to analyze the compatibility of electronic voting with international electoral standards and with principles of the Italian Constitution. In the first chapter I attempt to give a definition of electronic voting and to list different types of electronic tools. Even if new technologies can be used in every stage of the electoral process, from voter registration to tabulation of results, we can assume that electronic voting involves the use of electronic means in at least the casting of the vote or the counting. In the second chapter I describe the most relevant international documents and instruments for elections and I list and consider the international election standards, also from the point of view of the compatibility of electronic voting with those standards. The standards are: periodic elections, genuine elections, free elections, fair elections, universal suffrage, equal suffrage, secret vote and honest counting and reporting of results. In the third chapter I examine article 48 of the Italian Constitution which provides universal suffrage and personal, equal, free and secret voting. In the fourth chapter I describe a few experiences of electronic voting abroad: countries in which electronic voting has been adopted inside polling station I examine cases in Belgium, Russia and Venezuela, whereas for remote electronic voting I study cases in Switzerland, France and Estonia. In the last chapter I analyze how electronic voting has been adopted in Italy where it is restricted to a small number of tests inside polling stations and experimentation of electronic tallying of results. Furthermore, I describe a few cases of voting on line not regarding elections or referendums, but polling for University bodies, company bodies or inside political parties. After this research it is possible to draw the following conclusions: basically, electronic voting seems to comply with the Italian Constitution. However, since the election process is a very sensitive subject, using new technologies in elections must be approached considering the public trust and confidence, with the consequence that it is necessary to distinguish between electronic voting inside polling stations and electronic voting on line. Without doubt, electronic voting inside polling stations complies with the Italian Constitution and it would be possible to adopt it; instead, for electronic voting on line it seems that a gradual approach would be more adequate for replacing the postal voting

Democracy Enhancing Technologies: Toward deployable and incoercible E2E elections

End-to-end verifiable election systems (E2E systems) provide a provably correct tally while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's ballot, even if the voter is complicit in demonstrating how they voted. Providing voter incoercibility is one of the main challenges of designing E2E systems, particularly in the case of internet voting. A second challenge is building deployable, human-voteable E2E systems that conform to election laws and conventions. This dissertation examines deployability, coercion-resistance, and their intersection in election systems. In the course of this study, we introduce three new election systems, (Scantegrity, Eperio, and Selections), report on two real-world elections using E2E systems (Punchscan and Scantegrity), and study incoercibility issues in one deployed system (Punchscan). In addition, we propose and study new practical primitives for random beacons, secret printing, and panic passwords. These are tools that can be used in an election to, respectively, generate publicly verifiable random numbers, distribute the printing of secrets between non-colluding printers, and to covertly signal duress during authentication. While developed to solve specific problems in deployable and incoercible E2E systems, these techniques may be of independent interest