Teaching case: Analysis of an electronic voting system

This teaching case discusses the analysis of an electronic voting system. The development of the case was motivated by research into information security and management, but as it includes procedural aspects, organizational structure and personnel, it is a suitable basis for all aspects of systems analysis, planning and design tasks. The material is based on real life analysis of currently used electronic voting systems, which have been generalized so as to highlight the wider issues and to not identify with any particular implementation of electronic voting. Suggested project deliverables are described in the teaching case, and these are complemented by the associated teaching notes which detail sample solutions and discussion points for class

Analysis of an Electronic Voting System

This teaching case discusses the analysis of an electronic voting system. The development of the case was motivated by research into information security and management, but as it includes procedural aspects, organizational structure and personnel, it is a suitable basis for all aspects of systems analysis, planning and design tasks. The material is based on real life analysis of currently used electronic voting systems, which have been generalized so as to highlight the wider issues and to not identify with any particular implementation of electronic voting. Suggested project deliverables are described in the teaching case, and these are complemented by the associated teaching notes which detail sample solutions and discussion points for class

What do identifiers in HL7 identify? An essay in the ontology of identity

Health Level 7 (HL7) is an organization seeking to provide universal standards for the exchange of healthcare information. In a document entitled ‘HL7 Version 3 Standard: Data Types’, the HL7 organization advances descriptions of data types recom- mended for use as identifiers. We will argue that the descriptions supplied provide insufficient guidance as to what exactly the entities are which these data types uniquely identify. Are they real things, such as persons or pieces of equipment? Or are they representations of such real things in information artifacts? We here outline the problems faced by HL7 in providing answers to such questions, problems which arise because of the lack of anything like a coherent ontology in the HL7 standard, and we make some recommendations for future improvements

Simulating the New Economy

The IT, the Internet, or the Computing & Communications (C&C) technology revolution has been central to the economic discussion for several decades. Before the mid-1990s the catchword was the “productivity paradox” coined by Robert Solow, who stated in 1987 that “computers are everywhere visible, except in the productivity statistics”. Then the New Economy and fast productivity growth fueled by C&C technology suddenly became the catchword of the very late 1990s. Its luster however, faded almost as fast as it arrived with the dot.com deaths of the first years of the new millennium. With this paper we demonstrate that the two paradoxes above are perfectly compatible within a consistent micro (firm) based macro theoretical framework of endogenous growth. Within the same model framework also a third paradox can be resolved, namely the fact that the previous major New Industry creation, the Industrial Revolution, only involved a handful of Western nations that had got their institutions in order. If the New Economy is a potential reality, one cannot take for granted that all industrial economies will participate successfully in its introduction. It all depends on the local receiver competence to build industry on the new technology. We, hence, also demonstrate within the same model the existence of the risk of failing altogether to capture the opportunities of a New Economy.Industrial simulation; Innovation and growth; The New Economy; Non-linear dynamics

Modeling and Analyzing Faults to Improve Election Process Robustness

This paper presents an approach for continuous process improvement and illustrates its application to improving the robustness of election processes. In this approach, the Little-JIL process definition language is used to create a precise and detailed model of an election process. Given this process model and a potential undesirable event, or hazard, a fault tree is automatically derived. Fault tree analysis is then used to automatically identify combinations of failures that might allow the selected potential hazard to occur. Once these combinations have been identified, we iteratively improve the process model to increase the robustness of the election process against those combinations that seem the most likely to occur. We demonstrate this approach for the Yolo County election process. We focus our analysis on the ballot counting process and what happens when a discrepancy is found during the count. We identify two single points of failure (SPFs) in this process and propose process modifications that we then show remove these SPFs

Experimental technology-enhanced voting system in Nigeria: a stumbling block or stepping stone? / Sistema de votação experimental com tecnologia avançada na Nigéria: uma pedra de tropeço ou trampolim?

During the 2015 general elections, Nigeria sought a technology solution that could guarantee the concept of ‘one citizen, one vote’ mandate and establish reliable and accurate voting system. The experiment has been subjected to different analyses among political observers in the country. This essay is one of such attempts but with a distinct task of ascertaining whether the ‘e-voting’ experiment was really a stepping stone or a stumbling block for electoral democracy in the country. This theoretical diagnosis is done by weighting its weaknesses and strengths and the need for improvement

A type-level approach to component prototyping

Algebraic theories for modeling components and their interactions offer abstraction over the specifics of component states and interfaces. For example, such theories deal with forms of sequential composition of two components in a manner independent of the type of data stored in the states of the components, and independent of the number and types of methods offered by the interfaces of the combinators. General purpose programming languages do not offer this level of abstraction, which implies that a gap must be bridged when turning component models into implementations. In this paper, we present an approach to prototyping of component-based systems that employs so-called type-level programming (or compile-time computation) to bridge the gap between abstract component models and their type-safe implementation in a functional programming language. We demonstrate our approach using Barbosa’s model of components as generalized Mealy machines. For this model, we develop a combinator library in Haskell, which uses typelevel programming with two effects. Firstly, wiring between components is computed during compilation. Secondly, the well-formedness of the component compositions is guarded byHaskell’s strong type system.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, under grant number SFRH/BD/30231/2006

From the Parliament to a Polling Station: How to Make Electoral Laws More Comprehensible to Election Administrators

This article suggests that law modelling (using Business Process Model and Notation, BPMN) could make electoral laws more comprehensible to different stakeholders, and in particular, to election administration, especially in the cases of complex elections with multiple voting channels. This solution helps election administrators to translate the complexity of electoral laws into clear instructions. By this, election administration can adapt to the frequent changes in laws, reach better regulatory compliance, and address the barriers they meet during the delivery of the elections, like overtasking and lack of institutional memory. As a proof of the concept, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed solution by modelling one voting channel available in the 2019 parliamentary elections in Estonia, advance voting. The article contributes to the theory on election administration, and suggests how this solution could be used in practice: in the field of the electoral law, and outside of it

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