Contributions to traditional electronic voting systems in order to reinforce citizen confidence

Abstract: This document provides a general description of the telematic voting scenario designed by the author’s research group. This scenario reinforces verification procedures as key elements to achieve full acceptance of the system on the part of voters. To frame this work, a general overview of electronic voting is given and the conditions entailed by these systems are specified. 1 Problems inherent to telematic voting Since the first experiments in the 1960's with computerized voting until today, in which electronic ballot boxes or Internet voting are being tested, the mass media highlighted a number of experiences around the world under the general concept of electronic voting. However, these experiments have involved diverse types of voting systems, where the security guarantees required in authentication processes, voting and tallying are provided in quite diverse forms. In [CGP02] the authors propose a classification of voting systems into several levels of complexity. We can therefore identify two main groups that are relevant to our work: i) Systems that substitute one of the physical components of traditional voting procedures with some type of electronic process (i.e. Direct-Recording Electronic), and ii) those that use telematic networks to link voters to a remote polling station. For the last several years, nearly all governmental action designed to automate voting processes involve policies that fall within the first group, where the electronic ballot box, with or without a ballot, is the most commonly used device in all cases. The experiences of countries like Brazil [Re04] and India [In06] are noteworthy in this regard, particularly the latter, with its hundreds of millions of votes cast confirming the validity of this method. 3