Validation and verification issues in e-Voting

Electronic democracy (e-democracy) is a necessity in this era of computers and information technology. Electronic election (e-election) is one of the most important applications of e-democracy, because of the importance of the voters' privacy and the possibility of frauds. Electronic voting (e-Voting) is the most significant part of e-election, which refers to the use of computers or computerised voting equipment to cast ballots in an election. Due to the rapid growth of computer technologies and advances in cryptographic techniques, e-Voting is now an applicable alternative for many non-govern mental elections. However, security demands become higher when voting takes place in the political area. Requirement analysis is an important part of the system design process and it is impossible to develop the right system in the right way without correct and complete set of requirements. In the literature, many e-Voting requirements are defined. However, the researchers started to discuss the verification in e-Voting recently. Unfortunately the definitions for verifiability are inadequate and unclear; and it is categorised as individual verifiability and universal verifiability, where they are generally misused in the literature. Moreover, validation is not discussed yet. This paper focuses on the importance of the validation and verification in e-Voting, gives proper definitions for validity and verifiability in e-Voting and describes their relation to accuracy and robustness of the e-Voting system. This paper also states some problems to design and develop secure and verifiable e-Voting systems and provides basic requirements that any e-Voting system should satisfy