National Journal of System and Information Technology

Abstract

Elections allow the populace to choose their representatives and express their preferences for how they will be governed. Naturally, the integrity of the election process is fundamental to the integrity of democracy itself. The election system must be sufficiently robust to withstand a variety of fraudulent behaviors and must be sufficiently transparent and comprehensible that voters and candidates can accept the results of an election. Unsurprisingly, history is littered with examples of elections being manipulated in order to influence their outcome.

The design of a "good" voting system, whether electronic or using traditional paper ballots or mechanical devices must satisfy a number of sometimes competing criteria. The anonymity of a voter's ballot must be preserved, both to guarantee the voter's safety when voting against a malevolent candidate, and to guarantee that voters have no evidence that proves which candidates received their votes. The existence of such evidence would allow votes to be purchased by a candidate.

The voting system must also be tamper-resistant to thwart a wide range of attacks, including ballot stuffing by voters and incorrect tallying by insiders. Another factor is the importance of human factors. A voting system must be comprehensible to and usable by the entire voting population, regardless of age, infirmity, or disability. Providing accessibility to such a diverse population is an important engineering problem and one where, if other security is done well, electronic voting could be a great improvement over current paper systems. Flaws in any of these aspects of a voting system, however, can lead to indecisive or incorrect election results. There have been several studies on using computer technologies to improve elections. These studies caution against the risks of moving too quickly to adopt electronic voting machines because of the software engineering challenges, insider threats, network vulnerabilities, and the challenges of auditing.

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