XML Based Security Model for Enhancing the Integrity and the Privacy of E-Voting Systems

As the world is becoming more technological, using electronic voting could be very beneficial in elections rather using traditional paper-based election schemes. However, there are many security related issues that can cause significant problems in electronic voting (e-voting). Violating voters’ privacy or integrity of ballots would definitely cause serious problems with the entire election process. People may refuse to accept the electronic form of elections. Existing e-voting systems use sophisticated but inefficient, and expensive techniques to satisfy the security requirements of e-voting. Therefore, most of small and mid-size electoral populations cannot employ e-voting systems in their elections and experience remarkable benefits of e-voting. In this thesis, a new electronic voting approach is proposed using extensible markup language (XML) to verify and secure the integrity as well as to preserve the privacy of the voters. The evaluation results of this thesis show that the new approach is an implementation friendly, efficient, and also cost-effective approach to safeguard integrity and privacy related security requirements of e-voting systems for small and mid-size electoral populations