Electronic voting system for RIT Student Government elections

Recent studies argue that traditional voting systems do not encourage increased voter participation due to constraints in time, location, accuracy, and, accessibility. To ensure the rights of a democratic society and to enhance and secure the voting rights of citizens by surpassing all the limitations of the traditional voting system, the development of an electronic voting system is an attractive solution. Research on secure electronic voting systems has been conducted for at least the past two decades. We propose to develop an electronic voting system, called the Rochester Institute of Technology Student Government Election System (SGEES) based on Damgard et al. This voting scheme will use efficient honest-verifier zero-knowledge, which, unlike previous election schemes, are both easy to compute and to verify for both voters and authorities. Our proposed electronic voting system will allow convenient and confident voting while maintaining the accuracy of election results. This project will address the security requirements for electronic voting over the Internet, including privacy, completeness, soundness, receipt-freeness, and universal verifiability. In particular, we will research the feasibility of the voting scheme and protocols by studying three related cryptographical theories: homomorphic encryption, efficient honest-verifier zero-knowledge proofs, and threshold decryption cryptosystem

Bits or Paper? Comparing Remote Electronic Voting to Postal Voting

In the recent years it has often been discussed how elections can be conducted via the Internet. Many countries, including Germany, Estonia, Great Britain, Switzerland, USA or Austria have run tests of implementing e-Voting on different levels. Whilst offering e-Voting for public elections implies various legal problems, associations can allow for e-Voting in a relatively easy way. In this paper we investigate an election run by the leading German non governmental organization (NGO) in information technology – the Gesellschaft fur Informatik (GI) – that provided ¨ for remote voting using postal voting and electronic voting via the Internet. It is a common requirement by election officials for remote e-Voting to be as secure as regular postal voting. To come up with an assessment the use of a criteria catalogue is best to compare these forms of voting

Making Code Voting Secure against Insider Threats using Unconditionally Secure MIX Schemes and Human PSMT Protocols

Code voting was introduced by Chaum as a solution for using a possibly infected-by-malware device to cast a vote in an electronic voting application. Chaum's work on code voting assumed voting codes are physically delivered to voters using the mail system, implicitly requiring to trust the mail system. This is not necessarily a valid assumption to make - especially if the mail system cannot be trusted. When conspiring with the recipient of the cast ballots, privacy is broken. It is clear to the public that when it comes to privacy, computers and "secure" communication over the Internet cannot fully be trusted. This emphasizes the importance of using: (1) Unconditional security for secure network communication. (2) Reduce reliance on untrusted computers. In this paper we explore how to remove the mail system trust assumption in code voting. We use PSMT protocols (SCN 2012) where with the help of visual aids, humans can carry out $\mod 10$ addition correctly with a 99\% degree of accuracy. We introduce an unconditionally secure MIX based on the combinatorics of set systems. Given that end users of our proposed voting scheme construction are humans we \emph{cannot use} classical Secure Multi Party Computation protocols. Our solutions are for both single and multi-seat elections achieving: \begin{enumerate}[i)] \item An anonymous and perfectly secure communication network secure against a $t$-bounded passive adversary used to deliver voting, \item The end step of the protocol can be handled by a human to evade the threat of malware. \end{enumerate} We do not focus on active adversaries

E-voting discourses in the UK and the Netherlands

A qualitative case study of the e-voting discourses in the UK and the Netherlands was performed based on the theory of strategic niche management. In both countries, eight e-voting experts were interviewed on their expectations, risk estimations, cooperation and learning experiences. The results show that differences in these variables can partly explain the variations in the embedding of e-voting in the two countries, from a qualitative point of view