Evaluation of Electronic Voting

Abstract

This chapter provides fundamentals of electronic voting. An essential contribution is the classification among the three dimensions (medium, environment, and point in time) in Sect. 2.1. In particular, this section shows that the electronic version of the traditional polling station election is constituted by the application of electronic voting machines in the polling station (either stand-alone, networked, or paper-based) and that the electronic version of postal voting is remote electronic voting. As, mostly, the traditional election form runs in parallel to the new electronic implementation. Afterwards, the challenges for multiple channel elections are discussed. The main challenges concern the prevention of multiple vote casting using different channels and the computation of intermediate results. All these findings are essential for the requirement definition, as the requirements depend on the traditional election type to be replaced by the electronic voting system and to which the electronic system should run in parallel. In Sect. 2.2, the general differences between paper-based and electronic voting are presented. The differences mainly address the possibilities for manipulations: while in the paper-based system it is easy to manipulate the system in general, the electronic voting system enables large scale manipulations. Besides this, the trust aspect plays an important role in this section: while the voters in a paper-based election only need to trust the poll workers, the e-voters also need to trust the developers and administrators. It is essential for the requirement definition to identify these differences because they require additional requirements for electronic voting systems (meaning requirements that do not exist for paper-based elections). Section 2.3 focuses on two forms of electronic voting machines and describes technical possible implementation for these types of electronic voting systems.: (stand-alone) direct recording electronic voting machines and the Digital Election Pen system are discussed. As requirements for the Digital Election Pen are already defined in [158], this book focuses on stand-alone direct recording electronic voting machines. Section 2.4 concentrates on remote electronic voting systems. Different implementations are discussed for the general architecture, the voter authentication, the protection of the secrecy of the vote, and the client-side voting software. The advantages and disadvantages of all implementations are discussed. There is no best solution but it is shown that the implementation depends on many aspects, including the level of the election. Thereby, the processed and structured information essentially contributes to the definition of requirements for stand-alone direct recording electronic voting machines and for remote electronic voting systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.